Working with Google sheets
This tool takes as input a collection of sheets, which are stored as TSV files.
You can make use of various ways of managing/organizing these:
- TSVs files maintained in GitHub
- Google sheets
- Excel spreadsheets
- SQLite databases
Tips for each of these and for organizing your information are provided below
Multiple sheets vs single sheets
It is up to you whether you represent your schema as a single sheet or as multiple sheets
However, if your schema includes a mixture of different element types, you may end up with a lot of null values if you have a single sheet. It can be more intuitive to "normalize" your schema description into different sheets:
- sheets for classes/slots
- sheets for enums
- sheets for types
Currently schemasheets has no built in facilities for interacting directly with google sheets - it is up to you to both download and upload these
TODO: scripts for merging/splitting sheets
gsheets option
For going from sheets to linkml, you can specify --gsheet-id, then each argument becomes the name of a sheet. This automatically downloads each sheet and dynamically transforms.
E.g.
sheets2linkml --gsheet-id 1wVoaiFg47aT9YWNeRfTZ8tYHN8s8PAuDx5i2HUcDpvQ personinfo types prefixes -o personinfo.yaml
Note: due to a bug with google sheets API (see this Stack Overflow question), this will not work if your sheet has floats/decimals/booleans in them. It's not clear if google will ever fix this. If you need decimals, then you should either manually download the sheet to TSV, or use COGS.
COGS
We recommend the COGS framework for working with google sheets
A common pattern is a single sheet document for a schema, with different sheets/tabs for different parts of the schema