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LinkML Model to describe the Alliance curation/persistence data store

Model to describe the Alliance curation/persistence data store

Model Components and Visualizations

To browse the model through html and visualisation, visit the project page here. This page will always represent the model as available on the main branch of the repository.

To build the html and visualisations and browse it for a specific release or code version, checkout the repository locally (at that specific release tag, branch or commit) and run the following command:

make serve-docs

This should report the URL at which it is serving the docs locally, usually http://127.0.0.1:8000/alliance-genome/agr_curation_schema/.

Developing the AGR Curation Schema

The Alliance schema is stored in a series of interconnected YAML files in the model/schema directory written using LinkML syntax. LinkML is an object-oriented modeling language, tutorial here with tooling that can convert simple, easy to author YAML into validatable artifacts such as: JSON schemas, SQL DDL, python and java classes, markdown documentation and others.

Some of these artifact types and generated and stored in this repository as well including JSON schemas that are used to submit data. The main modeling components of any LinkML model are: classes, slots, enumerations and types.

Classes

Classes are a set or category of things having some property or attribute in common and differentiated from others by kind, type, or quality.

Slots

Slots (synonym: attributes) are properties or attributes of classes and can be specified once and reused in many classes in the model.

Types

Types can be "string" or "integer" per many language specifications, but if custom types can also be defined. Alliance model reuses a custom LinkML type (URIorCurie) which restricts a slot value to a URI or CURIE data type.

Enums

Enumerations are objects that are used to restrict the values of a particular slot to those declared in the enumeration.

Alliance Model Development Conventions

In addition to LinkML conventions, this repository follows a series of local conventions.

  • classes should be written in CamelCase
  • slots should be written in snake_case

The Schema is divided into several YAML files roughly by biological domain. There are two special YAML files that behave differently from the rest:

model/schema/allianceModel.yaml

allianceModel.yaml is the grouping schema file for all the other split out schemas (YAML files). In its "imports" section, all the other YAML files are listed by name. This helps the automated regeneration of artifacts (like JSONSchema, python, java files) to find and combine all the sub schemas together. When adding a new YAML file (a new biological domain, or new schema component file) be sure to add your schema file as an import to allianceModel.yaml

model/schema/core.yaml

The core.yaml file holds classes and attributes that should or can be reused in several of the biological domains (e.g. AuditedObject, a class that holds all relevant data tracking information is a parent class of all other biological objects that need to be audited.
AuditedObject lives in core.yaml)

Tests

Any time a new domain is developed, a test should be written to exercise the resulting JSON schema artifact. This helps provide example data for people seeking to produce data to our standard, and helps test the model for model developers. Test data belongs in test/data and test/invalid/data. Test files should be named following these conventions:

valid test data files: "test_name"_test.json

invalid test data files: "test_name"_invalid.json

And test file should be added (for the moment, we can turn this into a configuration file in another iteration) in the Makefile collections: SCHEMA_TEST_EXAMPLES, SCHEMA_TEST_EXAMPLES_INVALID

test/data/allele_test.json and test/data/invalid/allele_invalid.json are good examples of how to do this.

An easy way to write a test is to pull out the 'required' fields of a domain object from jsonschema/allianceModel.schema.json and write test data according to those required fields. Alternatively, a few submission objects from an existing submission will be a better exercise of the schema when not many fields are required.

Ingest classes

The use of separate classes for data ingest came about due to the inability to adequately represent requirements of data ingest and storage using the same model. An example of this is the curie field for disease annotations. This will be populated with Alliance-minted IDs and will be a required field in the database. However, because this ID is generated at the Alliance it cannot be a required field for ingest. The use of separate “DTO” (data transfer object) classes to represent the requirements for ingest, and ingest only, avoids issues such as this.

In addition to avoiding conflicting requirements, the use of separate classes for ingest makes the generated JSON schema for the ingest classes much cleaner. All fields that are populated via Alliance business logic can be excluded from the ingest classes. Slot naming and descriptions can also be tailored towards ingest, making it much clearer to DQMs exactly what is required for submission, e.g. evidence_codes in the DiseaseAnnotation class vs. evidence_code_curies in the DiseaseAnnotationDTO class. In both these cases, the generated JSON schema represents these slots as a list of strings but in the case of the former it is not clear which field is expected to be represented in the ingest file - it could just as well be the evidence code name or abbreviation that could be expected. Furthermore, the description in the evidence_code_curies slot definition could be used for ingest-specific instructions that would be propagated to the generated JSON schema.

In many cases, the inheritance pattern of the DTO classes will mirror that of the corresponding non-DTO classes, but that does not have to be the case. It may make sense to remove levels in the hierarchical structure in order to simplify the ingest schema and/or give more descriptive slot names. An example of this can be found in the DiseaseAnnotation and DiseaseAnnotationDTO classes. The DiseaseAnnotation class inherits from Association, which in turn inherits from AuditedObject. However, the DiseaseAnnotationDTO class inherits directly from the AuditedObjectDTO class and the slots corresponding to those in the Association class are moved up to the DiseaseAnnotationDTO class itself and its child classes. This allows the ingest slots corresponding to the Association class slots subject, predicate and object to be specific to the data type being ingested and be more descriptive - agm_curie, allele_curie and gene_curie in the AGMDiseaseAnnotationDTO, AlleleDiseaseAnnotationDTO, and GeneDiseaseAnnotationDTO classes correspond to subject; disease_relation_name and do_term_curie in the DiseaseAnnotationDTO class correspond to predicate and object. This makes the generated JSON schema much more transparent to DQMs.

Class names for ingest classes simply follow the naming of the corresponding non-ingest classes and add the DTO suffix although, as described above, not all classes in a hierarchy are necessarily represented.

Slot names for slots used in ingest classes should be descriptive of exactly what is required to be submitted. In many cases this will simply be the same name as the corresponding non-ingest slot with a suffix to indicate which field is required to be submitted. For classes that have a curie this is usually the snake case form of the class name with the suffix _curie (e.g. eco_term_curie or reference_curie), for slots where the corresponding non-ingest slot range is a VocabularyTerm it is typically the name of the vocabulary with the suffix _name, e.g. (genetic_sex_name). As with non-ingest slots, multivalued slot names should be pluralised (e.g. disease_qualifier_names). For inlined classes, where the complete class object is submitted as part of the submission of another class, the suffixes _dto or _dtos should be used (e.g. condition_relation_dtos or note_dtos). In cases where the non-ingest slot has a range of string, curie, or boolean and the slot name is sufficiently descriptive, there is no need to define a corresponding ingest slot and the same slot definition can be used in both ingest and non-ingest classes (e.g. is_extinct).

Building the Artifacts of the AGR Curation Schema

Artifacts of the AGR Curation Schema are defined as all the schema transformations that are automatically conducted via the Makefile in this repository. These artifact are generated using LinkML software added as a dependency in this repository.

In the Makefile here, all the different kinds of generated artifact targets are prefixed with 'gen-' to indicate that those targets create a specific kind of file. For example, the gen-jsonschema target generates the allianceModel.schema.json file are executed when make or make all is run from the command line. The github actions in this repository also use these Makefile targets to generate the artifacts for a pull request or for a release of the repository.

To regenerate python, java, jsonschema, etc. locally, run make from the command line. Two other important targets exist in the Makefile for this repository: stage and test. Stage moves all the assembled artifacts that are generated in a non-checked-in directory (target directory) into the top of the artifacts directory (/generated/) for easier discoverability and packaging of these artifacts and to enable ignoring these during PR review. stage is executed as part of the build targets in the Makefile via github actions (GA) and so developers can ignore these targets in favor of automated builds via GA.

To make a schema change and test your changes:

  1. checkout a new branch for development bash git checkout -b new_branch_name
  2. change the appropriate YAML file in model/schema
  3. rebuild all your artifacts (this in itself is a test of the validity of your schema change): bash make
  4. add or modify an existing test in test/data and test/data/invald
  5. add your new test, or verify the test you changed is available in the Makefile for execution.
  6. run the tests to confirm that your test data is validated against the generated JSONschema artifact that you made in step 2 above. bash git add test/data/[new_]test.json # optional step if you added a new test make clean make test
  7. commit your change and open pull request. bash git commit -a -m "message indicating what you changed."

Examples of valid ingest files and tests

The Makefile in this repository runs a series of json schema validation tests using test data stored in this repository. Test data are located in the test/data directory which is split into example data that are valid JSON according to the Alliance JSON schema, and data that are invalid.

The invalid tests will report how they are invalid, and expect to be invalid so that a passing 'invalid' test will report how its invalid but not break the build. This is a convenient way to exercise the schema and make subtle errors more clearly stated.

To run the tests in this repository:

make clean
make test

This will run both the valid and invalid tests.

Note there is a convention in this repository to make a 'set' slot for each ingest as a convenient convention for being able to validate objects in a JSON list. In the example below, an "allele ingest set" is defined in the model as being a multivalued slot that contains Allele objects. In this way, the JSON validator and automated tests can validate that the submission is a list of Allele objects (as opposed to a list of Gene objects, or a list of GOTerm objects). A simple example (using only the required fields of the Allele object), would look like this:

{
  "allele_ingest_set": [
    {
      "curie": "ZFIN:ZDB-ALT-123456-1",
      "taxon": "NCBITaxon:7955",
      "created_by": "ZFIN",
      "modified_by": "ZFIN"
    },
    {
      "curie": "ZFIN:ZDB-ALT-123456-2",
      "taxon": "NCBITaxon:7955",
      "created_by": "ZFIN",
      "modified_by": "ZFIN"
    }
  ]
}

Generating MOD JSON files and validating them

The Alliance JSON schema is generated from the Alliance model YAML in model/schema in this repository. Also provided in this repository is a simple JSON schema validator (util/validate_agr_schema.py) that has a command line interface.

For users wishing to run a validator locally before submitting their files to the Alliance, this can be done by:

  1. cloning the agr_curation_schema locally: 
git clone https://github.com/alliance-genome/agr_curation_schema
  1. validating a local JSON file against the schema: make sure you have linkml installed (see above for instructions on how to install the agr_curation_schema dependencies into your python environment). Then run the validator:
poetry run linkml-validate -C Ingest -s model/schema/allianceModel.yaml -s model/schema/allianceModel.yaml [path/to/your/submission/file.json]

example command using test data (replace test/allele_ingest_test.json with the path to your submission.json):

poetry run linkml-validate -C Ingest -s model/schema/allianceModel.yaml -s model/schema/allianceModel.yaml test/allele_ingest_test.json

note: it's good practice to use a python virtual environment when running commands as the installed version of python (for example, on most Mac operating systems is version 2 vs. version 3).
Here is a guide for working with python and poetry virtual environments: https://berkeleybop.github.io/best_practice/python_environments Note, the guide above has been tested with a wide variety of biomedical python projects and is a great learning guide for working with python and virtual environments.

The basic steps for setting up a system with multiple versions of python and virtual environments are: 1) Install pyenv, homebrew is a good method for installing pyenv:

brew update
brew install pyenv

once installed, you can add many versions of python to your system using pyenv:

pyenv install 3.8.15
pyenv global 3.8.15

2) Install poetry

curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -
poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true
poetry config virtualenvs.prefer-active-python true

3) Creating a virtual environment with poetry

git clone https://github.com/alliance-genome/agr_curation_schema
git checkout -b my_new_branch
cd agr_curation_schema
poetry install

5) Run the tests

make test

Alternate development environment - Using Docker

1) remove containers if exist

make remove-container

2) build and run the tests in the container

make build-container
make run-tests
````
This will mount and run your local directory to the docker container.  Any changes you make to the local 
directory will be reflected in the container.  This is a convenient way to run the tests in a clean 
environment without having to install the dependencies locally.

Make a change to the schema or tests files and run again:
```bash
make run-tests

3) remove the container when done

make remove-container

Alternate alternate test environment - just use pipx on MacOS

1) install pipx

brew install pipx --user

2) run tests in an isolated pipx environment

pipx run --spec linkml linkml-validate -C Ingest -s model/schema/allianceModel.yaml -s model/schema/allianceModel.yaml test/data/allele_test.json

If you need to make changes based on test results, you may wish to configure git according to https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/getting-started-with-git/about-remote-repositories#cloning-with-https-urls in order to avoid having to enter your github credentials every time you push a change.

All else fails

1) make schema changes in a branch 2) push the branch to github; github actions will run all the tests for you in an isolated environment even on a draft PR. Use the actions to see if your tests pass.

GitHub Actions

There are three GitHub action files that are triggered based on actions that occur on this repository.

  1. check-pull-request.yaml

On each pull request, the artifacts (JSONSchema, doc, python, java etc) are run in order to generate fresh models in those languages based on the changed schema YAML files.

Once the artifacts are built, the action also runs the test suite against the new schema to insure the tests data still passes the schema. One should change the tests when changing the schema in order to have PRs pass this check.

  1. build-deploy-documentation.yaml

On each merge into main, the docs are regerated (regenerated with a linkml generator) using the model/schema/*.yaml files, generates markdown documentation and UML diagrams and pushes them into the gh-pages branch of this repository.
Note: the documentation is only stored in the gh-pages branch only, not in the main repository.

This process is controlled in part by the mkdocs.yaml file in this repo which declares the source and site documentation repos and the location of the navigation index.html.

  1. pypi-publish.yaml

On release, this action is run to assembly and push this repository to PYPI automatically. This is currently disabled for Alliance Schema.