Aj Ireland

Background: Scientific research relies on well-structured, standardized data; however, much of it is stored in formats such as free-text lab notebooks, nonstandardized spreadsheets, or data repositories. This lack of structure challenges interoperability, making data integration, validation, and reuse difficult. Findings: LinkML (Linked Data Modeling Language) is an open framework that simplifies the process of authoring, validating, and sharing data. LinkML can describe a range of data structures, from flat, list-based models to complex, interrelated, and normalized models that utilize polymorphism and compound inheritance. It offers an approachable syntax that is not tied to any one technical architecture and can be integrated seamlessly with many existing frameworks. The LinkML syntax provides a standard way to describe schemas, classes, and relationships, allowing modelers to build well-defined, stable, and optionally ontology-aligned data structures. Once defined, LinkML schemas may be imported into other LinkML schemas. These key features make LinkML an accessible platform for interdisciplinary collaboration and a reliable way to define and share data semantics. Conclusions: LinkML helps reduce heterogeneity, complexity, and the proliferation of single-use data models while simultaneously enabling compliance with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data standards. LinkML has seen increasing adoption in various fields, including biology, chemistry, biomedicine, microbiome research, finance, electrical engineering, transportation, and commercial software development. In short, LinkML makes implicit models explicitly computable and allows data to be standardized at their origin. LinkML documentation and code are available at https://linkml.io/.

We introduce RWRtoolkit, a multiplex generation, exploration, and statistical package built for R and command-line users. RWRtoolkit enables the efficient exploration of large and highly complex biological networks generated from custom experimental data and/or from publicly available datasets, and is species agnostic. A range of functions can be used to find topological distances between biological entities, determine relationships within sets of interest, search for topological context around sets of interest, and statistically evaluate the strength of relationships within and between sets. The command-line interface is designed for parallelization on high-performance cluster systems, which enables high-throughput analysis such as permutation testing. Several tools in the package have also been made available for use in reproducible workflows via the KBase web application.

Leveraging the use of multiplex multi-omic networks, key insights into genetic and epigenetic mechanisms supporting biofuel production have been uncovered. Here, we introduce RWRtoolkit, a multiplex generation, exploration, and statistical package built for R and command line users. RWRtoolkit enables the efficient exploration of large and highly complex biological networks generated from custom experimental data and/or from publicly available datasets, and is species agnostic. A range of functions can be used to find topological distances between biological entities, determine relationships within sets of interest, search for topological context around sets of interest, and statistically evaluate the strength of relationships within and between sets. The command-line interface is designed for parallelisation on high performance cluster systems, which enables high throughput analysis such as permutation testing. Several tools in the package have also been made available for use in reproducible workflows via the KBase web application.