Embracing Semantic Technology for Better Metadata Authoring in Biomedicine

The Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) has developed a suite of tools and services that allow scientists to create and publish metadata describing scientific experiments. Using these tools and services—referred to collectively as the CEDAR Workbench—scientists can collaboratively author metadata and submit them to public repositories. A key focus of our software is semantically enriching metadata with ontology terms. The system combines emerging technologies, such as JSON-LD and graph databases, with modern software development technologies, such as microservices and container platforms. The result is a suite of user-friendly, Web-based tools and REST APIs that provide a versatile end-to-end solution to the problems of metadata authoring and management. This paper presents the architecture of the CEDAR Workbench and focuses on the technology choices made to construct an easily usable, open system that allows users to create and publish semantically enriched metadata in standard Web formats.