Status: In production
XCEDE is an extensible schema designed to store scientific data and meta data from a variety of sources and formats. XCEDE has its origins in various XML schemas developed for collaborative neuroinformatics projects, and was developed to enable the transfer and storage of several types of data including (but not limited to) clinical, demographic, behavioral, physiological and image data. Typical sources and targets for XCEDE data transfer include Web services, databases, data browsers, and data analysis tools.
Example of how a single subject may have MRI data, clinical data, multiple visits, or participate in multiple projects. XCEDE includes a standardized method for identifying these datasets.
The core XCEDE schema supports several major extensible components:
- A flexible experimental hierarchy: As illustrated in the above, the XCEDE experiment hierarchy consists of several levels (project, subject, visit, study, episode and acquisition) representing divisions of experiment data at various granularities. Elements at each level contain level-specific “info” elements, whose schema types may be derived to store experiment-specific or data modality-specific metadata. The linking mechanism between levels is flexible enough to support the omission of levels if the schema user finds them unnecessary.
- Experimental protocols: Specifications for order, number and time of experimental components (e.g. assessments within a clinical interview, scans within a scanning session, visits within a project) are supported using a generic protocol element.
- Event data: XCEDE has elements to support time-interval-annotated metadata such as behavioral stimulus/response data, per-timepoint QA metrics, etc.
- Data provenance: The complete history of a processing stream can be stored and propagated using provenance elements provided by the XCEDE schema.
- Plus: application-specific file and analysis lists (catalogs), interfaces to binary data, arbitrary user and application annotations, derived data, and more.
To access this tool: http://www.nitrc.org/projects/fbirn/
