Recent publications have shown that the majority of studies
cannot be adequately reproduced. The underlying causes seem to be
diverse. Usage of the wrong statistical tools can lead to the reporting of
dubious correlations as significant results. Missing information from lab
protocols or other metadata can make verification impossible. Especially
with the advent of Big Data in the life sciences and the hereby-involved
measurement of thousands of multi-omics samples, researchers depend
more than ever on adequate metadata annotation. In recent years, the
scientific community has created multiple experimental design standards,
which try to define the minimum information necessary to make experiments
reproducible. Tools help with creation or analysis of this abundance
of metadata, but are often still based on spreadsheet formats and
lack intuitive visualizations. We present an interactive graph visualization
tailored to experiments using a factorial experimental design. Our
solution summarizes sample sources and extracted samples based on similarity
of independent variables, enabling a quick grasp of the scientific
question at the core of the experiment even for large studies. We support
the ISA-Tab standard, enabling visualization of diverse omics experiments.
As part of our platform for data-driven biomedical research,
our implementation offers additional features to detect the status of data
generation and more. |