Paper Info
Title
The Risa R/Bioconductor package: integrative data analysis from experimental metadata and back again.
Abstract
The ISA-Tab format and software suite have been developed to break the silo effect induced by technology-specific formats for a variety of data types and to better support experimental metadata tracking. Experimentalists seldom use a single technique to monitor biological signals. Providing a multi-purpose, pragmatic and accessible format that abstracts away common constructs for describing Investigations, Studies and Assays, ISA is increasingly popular. To attract further interest towards the format and extend support to ensure reproducible research and reusable data, we present the Risa package, which delivers a central component to support the ISA format by enabling effortless integration with R, the popular, open source data crunching environment.The Risa package bridges the gap between the metadata collection and curation in an ISA-compliant way and the data analysis using the widely used statistical computing environment R. The package offers functionality for: i) parsing ISA-Tab datasets into R objects, ii) augmenting annotation with extra metadata not explicitly stated in the ISA syntax; iii) interfacing with domain specific R packages iv) suggesting potentially useful R packages available in Bioconductor for subsequent processing of the experimental data described in the ISA format; and finally v) saving back to ISA-Tab files augmented with analysis specific metadata from R. We demonstrate these features by presenting use cases for mass spectrometry data and DNA microarray data.The Risa package is open source (with LGPL license) and freely available through Bioconductor. By making Risa available, we aim to facilitate the task of processing experimental data, encouraging a uniform representation of experimental information and results while delivering tools for ensuring traceability and provenance tracking.The Risa package is available since Bioconductor 2.11 (version 1.0.0) and version 1.2.1 appeared in Bioconductor 2.12, both along with documentation and examples. The latest version of the code is at the development branch in Bioconductor and can also be accessed from GitHub https://github.com/ISA-tools/Risa, where the issue tracker allows users to report bugs or feature requests.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1186/1471-2105-15-S1-S11
BMC Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
microarrays,bioinformatics,algorithms
Metadata,Source data,Computer science,Software suite,Bioconductor,Data type,Software,Bioinformatics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
15
S-1
1471-2105
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.42
13
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Alejandra González-Beltrán115813.62
Steffen Neumann29510.04
Eamonn Maguire335931.64
Susanna-assunta Sansone487594.57
Philippe Rocca-serra5945104.91