The open source ISA metadata tracking tools facilitates standards compliant collection, curation, local management and reuse of datasets in an increasingly diverse set of life science domains. Built around the ‘Investigation’ (the project context), ‘Study’ (a unit of research) and ‘Assay’ (analytical measurement) metadata categories, the tools are designed to manage studies employing one or a combination of technologies.


Targeted to experimentalists,curators and developers , the ISA tools include the:

  • general-purpose ISA-Tab file format
    - an extensible, hierarchical structure that focuses on the description of the experimental metadata (i.e. sample characteristics, technology and measurement types, sample-to-data relationships);
  • desktop ISA software suite that
    - acts to create, edit, store and serve ISA-Tab files, empowering researchers to uptake community-defined minimum information checklists and ontologies, where required;
    - converts ISA-Tab files to a growing number of other related formats for submission to a growing number of international public repositories endorsing the tools, ENA (genomics), PRIDE (proteomics) and ArrayExpress (transcriptomics).




    • ISA software suite

    Read this fact sheet describing the ISA software components. Contact us if you are interested in having a demo to best use the tools or extend them for your local needs.

    ISAtab compliance

    If you are not using the ISA software suite to create ISA-Tab files, but want to create it with or export it from your own system, read the ISA-Tab format information page.

    Latest News

    A Commentary in Nature Genetics presents the ISA Commons community! More...


    The NCI caBIG® Nanotechnology Working Group extends the ISA-Tab for nanotechnology applications More...


    The EU ToxBank project is working to use the ISA-Tab format More...


    ISA down under: Bioplatforms Australia and CSIRO endorse the ISA infrastructure! More...


    The LINCS consortium is beginning to use the ISA-Tab format. More...


    BGI releases updated bioinformatics software and the GigaDB based on ISA infrastructure. More...


    ISA-Tab adopted by the SNRNASM annotation guidelines. More...


    The EBI public metabolomics repository, MetaboLights, will be fully based on ISA. More...


    Cite the growing ISA community Towards interoperable bioscience data Nature Genetics, Feb 2012
    Nature Genetics

    Authored by more than 50 collaborators at over 30 scientific organizations around the globe, this piece presents the growing ISA community: the ISA Commons."The participant communities pioneer the [ISA] approach and teach by example" writes the Editorial.

    Cite the ISA software suite & ISA-Tab format The ISA software suite Bioinformatics, 2011
    Bioinformatics

    Overview paper by the lead ISA developers, based at: University of Oxford, Harvard School of Public Health, EBI, NERC Environmental Bioinformatics Centre, Genomic Standards Consortium, US FDA Center for Bioinformatics, Leibniz Institute of Plant Biochemistry.

    Read our paper on data sharing policies 'OMICs data sharingScience, 2009
    Science

    Read our paper on data sharing policies, co-authored with international funding agencies. It highlights the ISA infrastructure as an exemplar project in response to the trend for funders and journals to require both that researchers make more of their data public.