Amplytica is start-up company whose software, called the Amplytica Cloud Platform, helps organizations determine how microbes influence their bioprocesses. Examples of such bioprocesses include anaerobic digestion, wastewater treatment and mine site reclamation. The Amplytica Cloud Platform does this by integrating and analyzing metagenomically derived microbial community data (species composition, diversity, and abundance) and industrial bioprocess data (e.g. temperature, pH, nutrients). To achieve data integration, industrial bioprocess data is considered metadata to the microbial community information and describes the environmental conditions where the microbial community is found. The capture of this industrial metadata requires a robust metadata capture system. Kroak is a metadata capture system for the Amplytica Cloud Platform that facilitates tagging per-sample microbial community information with industrial environmental metadata. It uses a modern web interface for easy deployment, Office Open XML Workbook (XLSX) template files for easy metadata capture, and metadata classes to ensure data consistency and type identification for follow on automated statistics and machine learning. Kroak is a functional metadata capture system which will be iteratively improved upon by Amplytica. Potential improvements include changes to Kroak’s data model, increasing the reliability of its metadata parsing and the expansion of its existing web application programming interface.
