Figure 3. BRIDGE process flow.

The BRIDGE web application uses isa4j to create ISA-Tab files from experimental data stored in a relational database management system (RDBMS). The data consists of passport data ¹⁴ describing the basic characteristics of a germplasm sample (such as accession number and location of origin) on the one hand, and of phenotypic data, which systematically describe phenotypic characteristics of the individual germplasm samples, on the other. Phenotypic images that are stored as binary files on a separate file server are linked from the ISA-Tab files and are included in the final ISA-Tab ZIP archive.