ESPERANTO: a GLP-field sEmi-SuPERvised toxicogenomics metadAta curatioN TOol.

Abstract

Biological data repositories are an invaluable source of publicly available research evidence. Unfortunately, the lack of convergence of the scientific community on a common metadata annotation strategy has resulted in large amounts of data with low FAIRness (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). The possibility of generating high-quality insights from their integration relies on data curation, which is typically an error-prone process while also being expensive in terms of time and human labour. Here, we present ESPERANTO, an innovative framework that enables a standardized semi-supervised harmonization and integration of toxicogenomics metadata and increases their FAIRness in a Good Laboratory Practice-compliant fashion. The harmonization across metadata is guaranteed with the definition of an ad hoc vocabulary. The tool interface is designed to support the user in metadata harmonization in a user-friendly manner, regardless of the background and the type of expertise. ESPERANTO and its user manual are freely available for academic purposes at https://github.com/fhaive/esperanto. The input and the results showcased in Supplementary File S1 are available at the same link.