RightField

RightField can specify a range of allowed terms from a chosen ontology (subclasses, individuals or combinations) for each annotation field. The resulting spreadsheet presents these terms to the users as a simple drop-down list. This reduces the adoption barrier for using community ontologies as the annotation is made by the scientist that generated the data rather than a third party, and the annotation is collected at the time of data collection.

RightField is a standalone Java application which uses Apache-POI for interacting with Microsoft documents. It enables users to import Excel spreadsheets, or generate new ones from scratch. Ontologies can either be imported from their local file systems, or from the BioPortal ontology repository. Individual cells, or whole columns or rows can be marked with the required ranges of ontology terms and an individual spreadsheet can be annotated with terms from multiple ontologies.

Once marked-up and saved, the RightField-enabled spreadsheet contains hidden sheets with information concerning the origins and versions of ontologies used in the annotation. This provenance information is important in the event of future ontology changes, which may deprecate values already chosen, or may add more fine-grained options and prompt re-annotation. RightField is intended as an administrators tool. It augments spreadsheets that may already conform to specific templates to further standardize terminology.