About

I’m new to the DataPLANT environment but want to engage in it by transforming my free text lab protocol into a metadata set. Is there anyway to create metadata sets which meets the FAIR requirements but works closely with my protocol? It’s hard for me to keep an overview and want to mainly focus on the processes in my protocol😕.

For this case the annotation table creation tool BOAT (Builder for Ontology Annotation Tables) comes in handy.

BOAT is a web-based tool which directly assists in creating metadata annotations out of your free text protocols. If you are new to the environment of DataPLANT tools and ARCs, this tool gives a direct entry into receiving metadata from your experimental processes, which are crucial for an ARC and to take advantage of the opportunities. The metadata can be connected with ontologies and an MS Excel and ARC compatible output containing your metadata can be downloaded as XLSX or JSON.

Sounds good! But how exactly does it work and how do I get my metadata in the end?

No worries! This documentation will guide you through the user-friendly annotation process in BOAT to get the most out of your protocol!

There will be information about:

• Document upload
• Adding and customizing an annotation
• Download of annotations
• Preview metadata and sub-pages

For a documentation with images, these can be found directly on BOAT under “Help”.

To get to know the workflow with BOAT, there will be a guide with a demo protocol. Please use the growth_protocol.md from the demo dataset after unzipping the folder Violas-PhD-Project.zip as described in the Getting Started section.

Why use BOAT?

Besides Swate, which is for a more advanced way of adding and editing standardized metadata sets directly in a tabular format, BOAT focuses on the processes in a protocol and provides a high level of user friendliness and a quick creation of metadata sets. BOAT can be accessed via the most common browsers and lets you directly jump in by working along your protocol.