User Quick Start Guide

The first thing you see when logging in to Open Data Manager is the Dashboard:

Dashboard

As a regular user the main tasks of interest are searching and browsing studies. Clicking on the Browse studies link from the dashboard takes you to the Study Browser to help you do this.

Study Browser

By default all studies are shown that you have permission to see, but since you aren’t expected to scroll through thousands of studies there are, of course, search and filtering options to help you find studies of interest. These are given in the left hand panel of the Study Browser and they allow you to search by study name, accession or by the text present in any metadata field.

Note

Harmonising your study and sample data (metadata) texts by using controlled vocabularies and ontologies helps searches find all relevant data by preventing missed results due to misspellings or non-standard term usage

The search is also controlled vocabulary/ontology aware and will expand results to include synonyms, with optional extension to include child terms. You can use asterisks (*) to allow any positive number of wildcard characters: “ale” will find “male” and “female” for example. Click on the question mark next to the search bar to open **Help* with more details about advanced search functionality.

The facets beneath the search bar allow you to filter down the results of a search based on the samaple data (metadata) fields that are present in your results.

To access more details about a study and to explore it further click the name of the study which will launch the Metadata Editor in a new tab.

Metadata Editor

The Metadata Editor allows you to see all the information about a study, the samples contained in the study and any signal data types associated with the study, for example, expression or variant data.