RightField: Semantic enrichment of systems biology data using spreadsheets

The interpretation and integration of experimental data depends on consistent metadata and uniform annotation. However, there are many barriers to the acquisition of this rich semantic metadata, not least the overhead and complexity of its collection by scientists. We present RightField, a lightweight spreadsheet-based annotation tool for lowering the barrier of manual metadata acquisition; and a data integration application for extracting and querying RDF data from these enriched spreadsheets. By hiding the complexities of semantic annotation, we can improve the collection of rich metadata, at source, by scientists. We illustrate the approach with results from the SysMO program, showing that RightField supports the whole workflow of semantic data collection, submission and RDF querying in Systems Biology. The RightField tool is freely available from http://www.rightfield.org.uk, and the code is open source under the BSD License. ©2012 IEEE.