We released version 2.3 of the CEDAR Workbench on May 1, offering significant new user features and internal capabilities.

New Value Recommender Service

We significantly updated CEDAR’s value recommendation capabilities in this release. The new approach adopts a powerful mechanism to suggest new values for fields in a templates as users fill in those fields. If the template creator enables the value recommender for at least 2 text fields (using each field’s SUGGESTIONS tab), CEDAR will find patterns across all the previously entered values for recommendation-enabled fields. If those patterns are strong enough over many metadata instances, CEDAR will recommend values to a user based on the (enabled) values that the user has already filled in.

This functionality is documented in more detail here.

New Sharing Modes

CEDAR now provides Shared With Me and Shared With Everybody modes on the workspace to let users see globally shared resources, or just resources explicitly shared with them. The default Workspace view just shows the files you own and administer. Shared with Me shows content that someone shared with you directly; and Shared with Everybody shows content that all CEDAR users can see (there are a lot of those!).

Your searches will always find everything you can see, no matter how it was shared.

Performance

We made many improvements to increase CEDAR’s performance. We improved the speed of searches and permission handling. We also worked on increasing the speed of Neo4j queries and queries to our REST APIs.

Perhaps most significantly, we improved auto-completion when filling in field values in the Metadata Editor. Thanks to BioPortal indexing every branch of terms in all its ontologies, CEDAR can quickly look up auto-completion values for even very large branches. This gives CEDAR consistently fast auto-completion and term discovery (and avoids unpleasant time-out warnings!).

New CEDAR Web Site

We created a new site at metadatacenter.org to present the most essential information about CEDAR. We will be using the new site for the latest updates (releases and blog posts) about CEDAR, but will continue to maintain other sites for technical documentation, videos, and general background (the original CEDAR web site).

You can find the latest links to all kinds of references about CEDAR documented at our references page.

Inside News

Open Metadata Microservice

Our goal is to make CEDAR metadata instances shareable on the web, and CEDAR’s metadata editing capabilities embedded in other sites. To do this, we’ve created an ‘open metadata microservice’ that will allow users to make their CEDAR resources openly accessible via REST calls to users without CEDAR accounts. We will provide user interfaces to create and access these open resources in the near future.

Inside Inside News

This release also incorporates a significant number of usability enhancements and bug fixes.

And, we updated all CEDAR Java-based components to work with Java 11.

All the tasks completed for the 2.3 release series can be found with this GitHub search, or by visiting the GitHub release page for release-2.3.