[ENH] Additional age related columns for participants.tsv file to cover animal data

[ree-gupta]

The PR adds columns for age_category, age_type, birthdate as discussed and suggested by @yarikoptic in #1826

This is open for discussion.

Related issues:

• [ENH] microelectrode electrophysiology specification (BEP032) #1705
• Formalize participants' age to clarify the reference point #1634
• Clarify that age Units could be overriden + that type is number OR "89+" string #1791

@bids-standard/bep032

[bendichter]

What would be the best way to indicate that these fields are recommended for non-humans, but not recommended for humans?

[yarikoptic]

What would be the best way to indicate that these fields are recommended for non-humans, but not recommended for humans?

Besides birthday I think we can entirely avoid species-specificity here, but I liked phrasing to refer to units section on anonymization. I was looking at the stages and if someone annotates that it is late adult stage - it might help finding subjects of such interest. It is more of a question to me of duplicity of metadata, thus possibly leading to incongruities.

[yarikoptic]

slight tune ups

[yarikoptic]

is there some ontology or controlled vocab to reference here as well by any chance?

@lzehl says "No!"

[yarikoptic]

if age_reference, some time points to consider:

• fertilization
• birth
• gestation
• ...

it seems we are boiling down to establishing a list of Enums with clear definitions and possibly adding TermURLs for some of them where there is a clear association.

TODO also to formalize such "TermURL" like linking at the level of schema which seems to lack it ATM.

[lzehl]

@bendichter @yarikoptic I agree that only birth_date causes issues with humans due to GDPR.
For the age_category we use in openMINDS:
https://openminds-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/latest/instance_libraries/terminologies/ageCategory.html

This list is derived from the UBERON ontology where possible with small additions were needed. Note that openMINDS did not yet integrate all UBERON life cycle stages:
https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ols4/ontologies/uberon/classes/http%253A%252F%252Fpurl.obolibrary.org%252Fobo%252FUBERON_0000104?lang=en

age_type in addition to define the reference point of the age value is a good idea. I'm not sure if the ontology https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/FMA/?p=classes&conceptid=http://purl.org/sig/ont/fma/fma312872 suggested by @satra in #1634 is species independent defined (definitions are also very sparse in this ontology).