CEDAR Release 1.0.0

We are pleased to announce release 1.0.0 of the CEDAR Workbench.

The goal of the CEDAR system is to encourage biomedical investigators to annotate their experimental data with high quality metadata, making possible the indexing, retrieval, integration, and analysis of Big Data repositories in ways that to date have been impossible. Going forward, CEDAR will continually improve to make it simple, and maybe even fun, for scientists to annotate their experimental data in ways that will ensure their value to the scientific community.

For more information about the capabilities of the CEDAR system, see our orientation.

Major new features since the last 0.9.2 release include:

New Metadata Editor

We have enhanced CEDAR's Metadata Editor to provide a compact, intuitive display of metadata forms and to dramatically speed up the entry of metadata.

Intelligent authoring capabilities

As a first step in providing an array of intelligent authoring features, we have enhanced the CEDAR Workbench with value recommendation capabilities. Our system identifies common patterns in the CEDAR metadata repository, and generates real-time suggestions for filling out metadata templates. These suggestions are context-sensitive, meaning that the values predicted for a particular field are generated and ranked based on previously entered values. Our value recommendation approach supports both free-text values and terms from ontologies and controlled terminologies. This feature aims to speed up the metadata acquisition process.