Fig. 5.

ezBIDS errors and warnings for compliance and improved quality of BIDS datasets. ezBIDS alerts users to BIDS validation errors and provides additional guidance to BIDS validation via custom warnings, to ensure BIDS compliance and to provide recommendations for improved curation of datasets. Errors. Marked by an “x” symbol (red). Errors identify details that prevent the dataset from being BIDS compliant, identical to BIDS validator errors. These are displayed in red and must be rectified by the user before proceeding. In the example, the task entity label is missing from the func/bold sequence, which is required by BIDS. ezBIDS therefore flags it as an error to alert the user that this must be addressed. Warnings. Marked by an “!” symbol (gold). Warnings offer recommended changes to the current BIDS structure that would improve the quality and curation of the dataset, and are displayed in dark yellow. Unlike errors, ezBIDS warnings are different from the BIDS validator warnings; ezBIDS warnings are unique recommendations presented to users as a way to improve the quality of details and metadata that the final BIDS datasets will be stored with. In the example, the user specifies the phase encoding direction (direction) entity label as “PA”, when in reality, ezBIDS knows that the correction label should be “AP”. Such warnings alert users to potential mistakes that might overwise pass BIDS validation. ezBIDS is agnostic with regard to how users respond to these warnings, meaning that users can ignore warnings and proceed if they so choose, since warnings do not preclude BIDS compliance.