Structure

ArMet encompasses the entire timeline of a plant metabolomics experiment. It comprises nine components each of which describes part of the overall process of an experiment by way of a core set of data items. These items are relevant to all plant metabolomics experiments and serve as a minimal description for each component. In addition to the minimal core description, each component will have zero, one or more alternative descriptions (sub-components) that support the core data plus additional data to describe particular methodologies and/or technologies in more detail. The ability to define these detailed sub-components means that the architecture may provide specific support to particular projects, experiments or laboratories whilst maintaining the comparability of datasets from different origins by way of the core data. In addition the component-based approach enables customisations of the complete architecture to be defined. Such customisations allow the different personnel involved in a plant metabolomics experiment to be presented with the part of the overall architecture that is relevant to them. A number of these customisations may then be integrated to provide the complete architecture for a particular project.