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  • Your first encounter with Bioschemas profiles
  • A guided tour to some selected Bioschemas profiles
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  • TrainingMaterial
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  1. How to

How-to select the right profile for your resource

In this how-to, we will guide you through the necessary steps for you to select a Bioschemas profile that will be later used to mark up to your own resources.

PreviousWhat and why bioschemas.orgNextHow-to mark up your own resource with Bioschemas

Last updated 6 years ago

Your first encounter with Bioschemas profiles

You can find the availabe Bioschemas profiles at . There, you will be presented with a list of all the current and stable profiles. You can hover on the profile name to see a quick description. Should you need a more detailed information, just click on the profile name.

As seen on Figure 1, each profile will show you details such as current version, release date, use cases, crosswalk, tasks and issues, usage examples and live deploys.

  • Use cases: Used as a basis for the profile as they are the

  • Crosswalk: Documentation on the brainstorming and process followed by a group in order to come up with a profile specification

  • Tasks & issues: Link to a GitHub space where you can report issues with a profile, see the assignees, and participate of the discussion

  • Example: Usage examples for the profile

  • Live deploy: Link to live deploy for the profile

Which profile is the right one for you will depend on your resource. In the next section, we will present some hints on those profiles that have been, so far, more broadly used, i.e., mainly customizing generic types rather corresponding to specific Life Science entities.

A guided tour to some selected Bioschemas profiles

DataCatalog

Dataset

DataRecord

Event

Coming soon

TrainingMaterial

Coming soon

Course

Coming soon

CourseInstance

Coming soon

Also knows as data repository, a data catalog commonly aggregates more than one dataset. If your resources supports only one dataset, you still could decide to markup your resource, in this case, as and also (this would make it easier if you are thinking on adding more datasets). However, whenever more than one dataset is provided, it totally makes sense to have your resource as a .

If your resource provides data and you can easily identify a common entity type for all the data contained in it, you should probably go for a profile. Let's clarify what we mean by "common type". Let's suppose you have chemical compounds including drugs, proteins and cells. If you see them all as the same thing, chemical compound, you have one , and you have found the right profile for you. However, if you actually distinguish drugs from proteins from cells and so, and (maybe even) tailor the information provided for each case, you have a data catalog and multiple datasets, you should use both, one and multiple .

We do not officially provide a profile so it will be up to you which properties to use. But, please keep reading. is a tricky type, one that could be important for some resources but not so much (or easy to grasp) for some others. was born from the necessity of distinguishing information coming from the database model versus that one inherent to the entity represented on the database. It is getting a bit philocosphical, but bear with us. Any record on a database was created at some point in time, and was latest modifed at some other point. However, cells simply exist in nature, they do not quite correspond to something that is "created" by a conceptualization made by humans, they are a thing/entity, not a model of the thing.

So, if the distiction is important for you, go ahead and use to represent records/entries on your . Draw the line and use any BioChemEntity profile, e.g., protein, gene or sample, to represent the "thing/entity" that is about. If he distinction is not important for you ot it becomes too complicated to draw the line, use both at the same time to markup your records, i.e., + a profile.

Disclaimer: It could be that your dataset is not at all about a BioChemEntity. It could well be about , or Course, or so. Still, the same discussion applies to it.

DataCatalog
Dataset
DataCatalog
Dataset
Dataset
DataCatalog
Datasets
DataRecord
DataRecord
DataRecord
DataRecord
Dataset
DataRecord
DataRecord
BioChemEntity
TrainingMaterial
http://bioschemas.org/specifications
Figure 1. List of some Bioschemas profiles