Building Blocks

Building Blocks are necessary to sustain ontology information in an annotation table and are designed to follow the core idea behind the ISA-Tab format, although simplified.

Specification

Check out the ISA-XLSX specification to find out more about the individual building block types and their structure.

ISA-XLSX specification

1. Click on “Add building block” () in the Sidebar or Widgets.

2. Choose the type of building block you want to add, e.g. Parameter, Input, Factor… .

3. If you chose a descriptive building block type, use the search field to search for an ontology term. This term, together with your building block type, describes your workflow. If you want to add a building block with a unit, activate the unit box and use the search field to look for a fitting unit term.

   Example 1: Component [instrument model] will describe any mass spectrometry instrument model used in your workflow (source).

   Example 1 | Table

   Component [instrument model]	TSR (MS:1000031)	TAN (MS:1000031)

   Example 2 with unit: Factor [temperature] and degree Celsius as unit.

   Example 2 with unit | Table

   Factor [temperature]	Unit	TSR (PATO:0000146)	TAN (PATO:0000146)

   Note

   If you cannot find a fitting term, you can write an issue to request an ontology term here OR use free text input.

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4. Click “Add column” () to insert the building block into an existing Annotation Table. The new building block will be added after the selected column in the table. To change the position you can use the context menu.
Excel

4. Click “Add column” () to insert the building block into an existing Annotation Table. The new building block will be added after the selected column of the table. When a column outside the table is selected or the worksheet contains no annotation table, “Add column” fails.

5. Depending on the building block type, multiple columns might be created in the excel file.