Goals & Non-Goals

This processing pipeline was developed as a bachelor thesis. During the thesis a set of goals and non-goals was defined. The intention of these goals is to provide the best user experience, while still keeping the scope of the project manageable.

Goals

Leverage core tools

No new tool should be developed to solve a problem other tools like MZmine3 or Sirius are not already solving. Rather a new pipeline should be developed which leverages the existing solutions and makes them more accessible to users.

No tool version requirement

During the process of developing, it became apparent that managing the interface between multiple major versions of tools is impossible. As a result most of the steps have a vague dependency on a major version of a library, but apart from that, the only interface is the structure of output files such as .mzml, .mgfor .tsv which are less susceptible to interface changes.

Transparency

Make it very clear to the user what exactly is happening while the pipeline is running. Make Logging and collecting useful Metadata for the user a core feature.

Future-proofing

Build the system in a way that no major library interface update can break the entire system. Similarly, the system is built in a way which makes it easy to integrate into other tools later.

Non-Goals

Complete library integration

The system is built to quickly create a step using a specific functionality which is needed from a library. But it is not intended to integrate all functions of processing libraries from the beginning.