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How to contribute

CoreMeta4Cat is a community-driven standard — your feedback and knowledge directly shape what gets included. Here are the most common ways to get involved, no coding required.

Give feedback on a specific term

Every field on the schema documentation pages has a Submit Term Feedback button. Click it to open a pre-filled GitHub issue where you can suggest a change, report an error, or ask a question about that specific field. You will need a free GitHub account.

Report a problem or suggest a new field

Use the GitHub Issue Tracker. When opening an issue, try to include:

  • Which data class the field belongs to (Synthesis, Characterization, Reaction, Simulation)
  • What the field should be called and what it means
  • Why it is needed — a concrete example from your research helps a lot
  • Whether it should be Mandatory, Recommended, or Optional, and why

Ask a question

Not sure whether a field exists, or how to annotate something? Use the GitHub Discussions forum — no issue required.

Propose changes via the vocabulary workbook (no coding required)

Download the vocabulary reference workbook — a structured overview of all fields, organised by data class and colour-coded by importance (Mandatory / Recommended / Optional). The Introduction and Legend sheets explain the colour coding, column meanings, and how to propose changes directly in the file.

You can use it two ways:

  • As a reference — browse it to look up existing fields while designing or annotating your own data sheets.

  • To propose a change — edit a downloaded copy (correct a description, adjust M/R/O, add a new field or class — you can add a new field and the new class it points to in the same submission) and submit it as a pull request:

    1. Edit the Synthesis, Characterization, Reaction, or Simulation sheet directly. Don't rename sheets or change column headers.
    2. Place the edited file at inbox/coremeta4cat_vocabulary.xlsx in a new branch and open a pull request.
    3. An automated check validates the workbook and posts the results as a comment on your PR — including any errors to fix and warnings to review (e.g. if a field you changed is shared across multiple classes, it lists every other class your edit also affects).
    4. If validation passes, a maintainer reviews and merges; the schema updates automatically.

See inbox/README.md in the repository for the full workflow.

Rows shown in grey italics in the workbook are inherited from chemdcat-ap, the underlying chemistry model — they're shown for reference but can't be changed through this workflow; open an issue instead.

The schema is the authoritative source — the workbook is generated from it automatically, so any of your edits are proposals until they're validated and merged, not immediate changes.

Contribute code or schema changes

If you want to edit the LinkML schema YAML directly (larger structural changes, new modules, etc.), please first open an issue to discuss the change. Then follow the developer guidelines in CONTRIBUTING.md on GitHub.