Background
Next-generation sequencing has revolutionized research and medicine, and has been accompanied by increasingly challenging, if underappreciated, metadata management requirements. Sequencing projects that have large, complex and evolving metadata demand lightweight, flexible, stable software to support dataset standardization, biological curation activities, and streamlining of pre- and post- processing steps with pipeline analyses. The few existing open-source tools for managing next-generation sequencing metadata have limited flexibility, thus hampering project-specific tailoring, and cannot be easily deployed and managed by a single administrator for multiple research sites.
Commercially-available laboratory information management alternatives are typically expensive, cumbersome and require proprietary administration and maintenance for the software lifecycle, and none of the available tools, open-source or otherwise, readily integrate curation, processing and advanced analyses. We developed the Omics Metadata Management Software (OMMS), a flexible, extensible, open-source, web-based tool that provides semi-automated curation utilities, and integrated implementation with widely-used bioinformatics tools, such as BLAST and Bowtie, for human-microbiome-oriented research.
How to Get Access
The OMMS is open source, and is released under the GNU General Public License. The package can be downloaded below. The "Installation" bullet (under Quick Start), has links to relevant third-party software, documentation and other information.
The OMMS is an open-source database schema designed to support metadata curation tasks for next-generation sequencing projects, and should not be regarded as a complete, commercial-grade, bug-free application. Please contact Amy (ajpowel@sandia.gov), Martha (marperez@cs.unm.edu) or Russel (rlwaymi@sandia.gov) to make suggestions, report problems, etc. Happy computing!