Biological communities work across a range of domains and use a variety metrics to measure and evaluate their activities and performance. Metrics can be used in training, project management, software development as well as in more specific tasks like benchmarking of bioinformatics analysis tools or evaluation of data resources in the life science.

Even if it is possible to find data about specific metrics in publications or web resources, it is hard to find a proper description, methodology and implementation of such metrics. This makes it difficult to understand the specific meaning of a metric and makes it hard to compare metrics provided by different resources.

This project focused on proposing a solution to help to define, discover and access metrics and metrics implementations. We aimed to provide a prototype framework to help registering defined metrics and test run metrics implementations as a proof of concept. The aim being for users to be able to improve the evaluation of a resource, to assess the impact of a variety of services and gain a contribution into decision making. 

This study is now finished, the work is summarised in the end report and in two publications: 

• Top 10 metrics for life science software good practices (F1000R) 
• PIsCO: A Performance indicators framework for collection of bioinformatics resource metrics.  (PeerJ Preprints) 

An outline of the PIsCO framework is available on GitHub. The study also identified a relationship with Bioschemas and is looking to redefine the metrics database accordingly.