SBOL Examples

Welcome to SBOL Examples! Please feel free to use this repository to browse through or propose new SBOL or SBOLVisual examples.

Repository Structure

This repository contains examples for SBOL Data Model and SBOL Visual. For each SBOL and SBOL visual, we have three types of examples (in the respective subfolder):

• Best Practices: These are guidelines that have been examined thoroughly by the SBOL editors and the SBOL community. Each guideline will have detailed explanation along with examples. These guidelines are widely recommended as community standards for representing your data in SBOL or SBOL Visual.
• Curated Examples: These are examples that have been curated by the SBOL editors. These examples follow best practices and serve as points of reference for the community to understand how they can represent their data using SBOL. Curated examples will be well documented and would have gone through a discussion process to be considered.
• Uncurated Examples: There may not always be "one right way" to represent your data. While there the SBOL community recommends using the best practices, we don't want to restrict the way SBOL is used by the wider community. This is a place where the community can store either:
  • SBOL (Data or Visual) files that you have created as part of your project or workflow that you would like to share with the community.
  • An SBOL file that does not follow the best practices but is still useful in your project. In such cases, we would love to understand why the best practices were not relevant or applicable for your use case.

Submitting a proposal for a Best Practice

A best practice is a recommendation that helps with harmonisation and synergy within the SBOL community. To submit a proposal for a new Best Practice, we encourage you to submit a BEP - Best practice Enhancement Proposal. To understand the format and associated files in a BEP, please follow the following guide.

Once your BEP is ready, please follow these steps:

• Clone or Fork the SBOL-examples repository.
• Create a folder titled "BEP-XYZ" under the best-practices folder. Please track the discussion sessions and existing BEPs to assign a number to your BEP. For instance, if the latest BEP in discussion or accepted BEP is titled BEP012, please use the title: BEP013 for your new proposal.
• Please start a new discussion with number and title of your BEP. For example: BEP013 - Representing SBOL Workflows.
• Once the discussion phase has finished, the community will vote on the BEP.

Voting on a BEP

Voting and governance procedures for BEPs will follow the same as SEPs. To get the latest details, please see the Voting Procedures in the SBOL website.

If the BEP has been accepted, an SBOL editor will merge the PR with the main branch.

Submitting a new example.

The contents of this repository will be moderated by the SBOL editors to ensure that the examples are organized and accessible. However, we encourage submissions from anyone in the SBOL community.

To submit an example, please ensure you follow these steps:

• Clone or Fork the SBOL-examples repository.
• Create a new folder in the uncurated-examples subfolder in either SBOL or SBOL-Visual depending on the type of example you would like to submit.
  • Please ensure that the name of the subfolder is short and mnemonic so that it is easy to identify your example.
  • Please note that even if you wish to submit a single file, we recommend creating a folder and adding the file to that folder. This is so that we can add additional README documents within that folder to add documentation for your example.
  • Please note that the SBOL editors might change the name of the file or folder to make it more consistent with the rest of the examples in the repository.
  • As a general naming convention, please use the following format for both files and folders:
    • Please ensure that all names start with lower case alphabets.
    • If your file or folder name has multiple words, please use an underscore to separate the words.
• Create a new topic branch for your proposed example. Again, please ensure that the topic branch has a mnemonic name. We recommend the following format: <name of individual or organisation>/<branch name>.
• Submit a pull request for your branch.

At this point, you have two options for your submitted example:

1. If you would like your example to be considered as a curated example, please start a new discussion.
   • Please also include some documentation or description (in the form of a README.md file within the folder of your example) so that the community can understand the context of your example.
   • Additional media like flow charts, UML diagrams, or any image that explains the example is also highly appreciated and encouraged.
   • During the discussion process, the SBOL editors will examine if the example follows the recommended SBOL guidelines and best practices. If so, the example will be moved to the curated-examples sub-folder.
2. If you simply wish to submit your example (where it remains in the uncurated-examples folder), please indicate this in the Pull Request via comments. The editors will review the PR and merge if appropriate.

How do I check if my SBOL file follows Best Practices?

It may not always be practical or possible to programmatically check if an SBOL file follows a Best Practice. For examples submitted to this repository, the SBOL editors will go through the files to ensure that a file follows best practices.

Any ideas or efforts to help automate the checking of SBOL files for best practices is welcome and appreciated!