RightField

RightField is an open-source tool for adding ontology term selection to Excel spreadsheets. RightField uses a 'Template Creator' to create semantically aware Excel spreadsheet templates. These Excel templates are then reused by scientists to collect and annotate their data, without any need to understand, or even be aware of, RightField or the ontologies used. The project’s slogan is “Semantic data annotation by stealth.”
Providers
The University of Manchester and H-ITS (Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies) gGmbH
Licensing and cost
Free - BSD-Clause 3 LICENSE - https://github.com/myGrid/RightField/blob/master/LICENSE
Development Activity
Development activity has been low for the last couple of years, but expected to increase in the final quarter of 2016 and first quarter of 2017 due to additional resourcing from FAIRDOM and the use of internal development as part of a student project. At the time of writing (October 2016), the most recent release was that of 24th March 2014.
Platform and interoperability
RightField runs on any platform that supports Java. A dedicated packaged download is available for Mac OS X, as well as a compressed package for other platforms.
Functional notes
Documentation and user support
Documentation is available at http://rightfield.org.uk/guide, and support is available via a dedicated mailing list at http://rightfield.org.uk/contact_us
Usability
The interface is straightforward and easy to use for both the ontology creator and the data creator.
Expertise required
Low, although some knowledge and understanding of ontologies and Excel is required, for the ontology creator and the data creator respectively.
Standards compliance
RightField is built upon the standards of RDF and OWL, and Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet file format. It supports both XLS and the Office Open XLSX formats through the Apache POI open source library.
RightField itself is designed to encourage the use of standards for annotation within spreadsheets, by allowing standard vocabularies to be embedded within the templates it creates.
Influence and take-up
RightField has no particular dependency on discipline. Although originally developed for Biology, it has also been used in Archaeology, Computer Science and Psychology. In particular it is used in the FAIRDOM project (http://fair-dom.org) as part of a data collection workflow, and is also used in conjunction with the SEEK software (http://seek4science.org).
There have been approximately 250 downloads of the RightField templates since 2013, as well as 60 (non-mandatory) user registrations.
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