Validating ISA-Tab and ISA JSON

Using the ISA API you can validate ISA-Tab and ISA JSON files.

Validating ISA-Tab

To validate ISA-Tab files in a given directory ./tabdir/ against a given configuration found in a directory ./isaconfig-default_v2015-07-02/, do something like the following:

from isatools import isatab
my_json_report = isatab.validate(open(os.path.join('./tabdir/', 'i_investigation.txt')), './isaconfig-default_v2015-07-02/')

making sure to point to the investigation file of your ISA-Tab, and providing the XML configurations. The validator will then read the location of your study and assay table files from the investigation file in order to validate those. If no path to XML configurations is provided, the ISA API will automatically select and use the isaconfig-default_v2015-07-02 configurations.

This ISA-Tab validator has been tested against the sample data sets BII-I-1, BII-S-3 and BII-S-7, that are found in the isatools package.

The validator will return a JSON-formatted report of warnings and errors.

Validating ISA JSON

To validate an ISA JSON file against the ISA JSON version 1.0 specification you can use do so by doing this by doing something like:

from isatools import isajson
my_json_report = isajson.validate(open('isa.json'))

The rules we check for in the new validators are documented in this working document in Google spreadsheets. Please be aware as this is a working document, some of these rules may be amended as we get more feedback and evolve the ISA API code.

This ISA JSON validator has been tested against a range of dummy test data found in ISAdatasets GitHub repository.

The validator will return a JSON-formatted report of warnings and errors.

Batch validation of ISA-Tab and ISA-JSON

To validate a batch of ISA-Tabs or ISA-JSONs, you can use the batch_validate() function.

To validate a batch of ISA-Tabs, you can do something like:

from isatools import isatab
my_tabs = [
    '/path/to/study1/',
    '/path/to/study2/'
]
my_json_report = isatab.batch_validate(my_tabs, '/path/to/report.txt')

To validate a batch of ISA-JSONs, you can do something like

from isatools import isajson
my_jsons = [
    '/path/to/study1.json',
    '/path/to/study2.json'
]
my_json_report = isajson.batch_validate(my_jsons, '/path/to/report.txt')

In both cases, the batch validation will return a JSON-formatted report of warnings and errors.

Reformatting JSON reports

The JSON reports produced by the validators can be reformatted using a function found in the isatools.utils module.

For example, to write out the report as a CSV textfile to report.txt, you can do something like:

from isatools import utils
with open('report.txt', 'w') as report_file:
    report_file.write(utils.format_report_csv(my_json_report))