Home

Welcome to the SODA wiki!

Here we document everything there is to know about SODA!

What is SODA?

Once a milestone of a project is reached, SPARC investigators need to organize and prepare the corresponding datasets according to standards established by the Data Standard Committee, before sharing them on the Blackfynn platform for review by the Curation Team. To achieve that, investigators must identify the applicable guidelines for their specific datasets and generate metadata. This data organization process could become time-consuming and overwhelming as more and more data is generated, and eventually steer focus away from data acquisition and analysis, which should ideally remain the primary focus of the SPARC investigators. Software for Organizing Data Automatically (SODA) is a computer program intended to facilitate the data organization and curation processes through interactive tools and automation. If at any point you think: "Ah, if only this step could be simplified", actually it can be with SODA! Especially, SODA would allow users to:

• Conveniently organize datasets following the SPARC folder structure
• Convert file format to SPARC defined standards
• Generate metadata files with pre-populated fields, some automatically
• Validate dataset with the validator developed by the Curation Team
• Upload organized dataset directly on Blackfynn to avoid duplicating files locally
• Add required metadata to Blackfynn dataset
• Give permission to dataset (make PI owner, share with Curation Team, etc.)

SODA is distributed as an easy to install application for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.The front-end (Graphical User Interface or GUI) of SODA is built with Electron, an open-source framework developed and maintained by GitHub that conveniently combines HTML, CSS, and Javascript, while the back-end is developed in Python (v3.6). All source codes and files are shared with an open source license (MIT) to permit user modification without restrictions.