Concepts

Concepts

To get the most out of MARS, it is important to understand the underlying concepts that form the architecture of MARS and metadata stored using MARS.

Entities 📦

Everything is recognized as an "entity", from physical slices to antibodies. Entities are generalized and expressed using Attributes, expressing data via Values.

Entities have the following metadata components:

• Name: This is an ID or general name for an Entity.
• Owner: The owner or creator of the Entity.
• Date: The date that the Entity came into existence.
• Description: An entirely textual description of the Entity. Further metadata should be expressed later as Attributes.
• Collections: Specify any existing Collections that the Entity belongs to.
• Origin: If the Entity was created as a product of another Entity, then the other Entity is the Origin. The Origin Entity must already exist in the system.
• Products: If the Entity being entered into the system generated subsequent Entities that already exist in the system, the generated Entities can be specified.
• Attributes: This is a specific metadata component and is explained below.

Attributes ⚙️

Attributes are the primary method of expressing metadata associated with Entities. Attributes contain points of metadata known as Values. Values are named and can be of the following types:

• string: A textual description of any length.
• number: A numerical value.
• date: A date or time.
• url: A link to external or internal item.
• entity: A "soft" relation to another Entity. This does not have the significance of an Origin or Product Entity in the overall system, but could be used to express a similar concept.
• select: A drop-down containing a set of user-defined options that can be selected.

Collections 📚

Collections are simply groups of Entities. Collections can be of one type of Entities, or a mixture of multiple types. Collections can either be Standard collections, or Project collections.

At this stage there is no significant delineation between a Standard or Project collection, other than a label that can separate these categories of Collection.