Publicly available resources developed by the BioCompute community include:

BCO Community

• The BCO Gitter has spaces for general discussion, technical development, BCO implementation, and networking.

BCO Documentation

• The BCO SOP provides guidance on BCO creation, versioning, and certification.
• The BCO User Manual provides guidance on BCO evaluation.

BCO Editor

• The BCO Editor is a form based creation tool for generating BioCompute Objects. The BCO Editor contains built-in linting and conformance against the current BioCompute specification. The BCO Editor includes a database of created BCOs. Unless specified in the embargo field, BCOs in the database are viewable to the general public. Legacy Editor site can be found here.

Software Packages

• The R package biocompute can create, validate, and export BioCompute Objects. Users can encode information in data frames, and compose BioCompute Objects from the domains defined by the standard. A checksum validator and a JSON schema validator are provided. Also supports exporting BioCompute Objects as JSON, PDF, HTML, or Word documents, and exporting to cloud-based platforms.

BCO Registry

• The BioCompute consortium maintains a database of registered authorities. Registered authorities are able to assign their own IDs in the object_id field, such as gwu000001.

BCO Aggregator (under construction)

• The BioCompute consortium maintains a database of submitted BCOs. The database acts as a mirror that generates checksums for validation.

BCO “Cheat Sheet”

• A quick reference guide (PDF) for getting up to speed with reading a BCO.

Platform Specific Tools

HIVE

The High-throughput Integrated Virtual Environment (HIVE) for genome analysis and the widely used, open source Galaxy project both have platform specific tools for generating BioCompute Objects from workflows. Both of these can be found via the landing page.

Cancer Genomics Cloud

The Cancer Genomics Cloud (CGC) has a powerful tool built into the CGC platform to capture and export a workflow as a BioCompute Object.

References

1. 2791-2020 IEEE Standard
   The official IEEE standard, known as IEEE 2791-2020.

2. Repository
   The open source repository referenced by the standard. Three formats of the publication are available.

3. Semantic Versioning
   BioCompute versioning is based on semantic versioning, but does not use the “major” value in “major.minor.patch” (e.g. 2.4.11).

   • Use “minor” increments for additions (e.g. the addition of a “reviewedBy” block).
   • Use “patch” for minor fixes (e.g. editorial spelling corrections).
   • There is no “major” increment in BCO versioning. A BCO is a record of a specific instance of an analysis, so major changes result in a new BCO.

4. Provenance Ontology
   Contributor roles in a BCO are explicitly defined according to the Prov-O standard, and include roles for reviewing a BCO, creating the content in a BCO, and for authoring the BCO itself.

5. JSON Schema
   BioCompute is based heavily on the JSON Schema media type. Definitions and format within the BCO Schema adhere to “draft-handrews-json-schema-02.”