Description
Your idea
Hi there - This is my first BIDS issue, so please feel free to close/reroute me if this is the wrong forum for this question!
I work on Psych-DS, a BIDS-inspired standard for tabular behavioral datasets. One thing that has come up in my conversations with tool builders is that they are nervous about potentially needing to support multiple metadata files that 'clutter' a user's directory, or otherwise needing to handle the presence of more than one type of metadata. One use case for this scenario might be a scanning session that uses a task script originally developed for non-scanner use that generates its own response data output directory; the researcher then wants to incorporate this response data into a BIDS beh/ directory.
A possible solution to this problem would be for multiple data standards to allow for an "alias" for the top-level metadata object, e.g. by permitting a file called metadata.json that contains one or more JSON-LD objects.
For BIDS, this would mean allowing this alternative to the dataset_description.json with only a minor change to the content, namely the inclusion of a null @context field. This would allow the correct/relevant JSON to be identified, and any other JSON-LD content present in the file should be ignored by the BIDS spec.
This might look like:
{
"@context" : null,
"Name": "The mother of all experiments",
"BIDSVersion": "1.6.0",
"DatasetType": "raw",
"License": "CC0",
"Authors": [
"Paul Broca",
"Carl Wernicke"
],
##...etc.##
(As a side note, this might open a door to JSON-LD BIDS context or mapping to schema.org but that's a story for another day...this question is really just about the potential to 'package' the top-level metadata object into a file that might contain additional, irrelevant-to-BIDS information.)