Semantic types¶
All QIIME 2 artifacts have defined semantic types. This document is a placeholder for full documentation of how to use these types and how to define new semantic types in QIIME 2 plugins.
Why define semantic types?¶
Defining semantic types allows us to ensure that the data that is passed to an action is meaningful for the operation that will be performed. For example, a biom.Table object could contain presence/absence data (i.e., a 1 to indicate that an OTU was observed at least one time in a given sample, and a 0 to indicate than an OTU was not observed at least one time in a given sample). However, if that were provided to a function computing a quantitative diversity metric where OTU abundances are included in the calculation (e.g., weighted UniFrac), the function would complete successfully, but the result would not be meaningful.
QIIME 2 defines semantic types to help users avoid using functionality incorrectly, and to allow the system to reason about what QIIME 2 artifacts can be used with which methods and visualizers.
Common semantic types¶
Unless otherwise noted the following semantic types are defined by, and importable from, the q2-types plugin. It is also possible to define semantic types in any plugin, so the available semantic types are not limited to those defined in q2-types. Instructions will be added soon for how to accomplish this. In the meantime, you can refer to the q2-dummy-types repository for annotated examples.
FeatureTable[Frequency]: A feature table (e.g., samples by OTUs) where each value indicates the frequency of an OTU in the corresponding sample expressed as raw counts.
FeatureTable[RelativeFrequency]: A feature table (e.g., samples by OTUs) where each value indicates the relative abundance of an OTU in the corresponding sample such that the values for each sample will sum to 1.0.
FeatureTable[PresenceAbsence]: a feature table (e.g., samples by OTUs) where each value indicates whether an OTU is present or absent in the corresponding sample.
FeatureTable[Composition]: A feature table (e.g., samples by OTUs) where each value indicates the frequency of an OTU in the corresponding sample, and all frequencies are greater than zero.
Phylogeny[Rooted]: A rooted phylogenetic tree.
Phylogeny[Unrooted]: An unrooted phylogenetic tree.
DistanceMatrix: A distance matrix.
PCoAResults: The results of running principal coordinate analysis (PCoA).
SampleData[AlphaDiversity]: Alpha diversity values, each associated with a single sample identifier.
SampleData[SequencesWithQuality]: Sequences with quality scores, where each set of sequences is associated with a sample identifier (i.e. demultiplexed sequences).
SampleData[PairedEndSequencesWithQuality]: Paired-end sequences (forward and reverse) with quality scores, where each set of paired-end sequences is associated with a sample identifier (i.e. demultiplexed paired-end sequences).
FeatureData[Taxonomy]: Taxonomic information associated with a feature identifier.
FeatureData[Sequence]: A single unaligned sequence associated with a feature identifier (e.g. a representative sequence).
FeatureData[AlignedSequence]: A single aligned sequence associated with a feature identifier, where the alignment is with respect to the aligned sequences associated with all of the other feature identifiers (i.e., when more than one feature identifier is present this represents a multiple sequence alignment).
FeatureData[PairedEndSequence]: Paired-end sequences (forward and reverse) associated with a feature identifier.
EMPSingleEndSequences: Multiplexed single-end read sequence data that has been generated according to the Earth Microbiome Project sequencing protocol. See Importing data for details about importing this data type. This type was previously called RawSequences. The RawSequences type name was deprecated, but is now an alias for EMPSingleEndSequences. You should always use the name EMPSingleEndSequences in favor of RawSequences. This type is currently defined in the q2-demux plugin, but in the future will likely be moved to q2-types.
EMPPairedEndSequences: Multiplexed paired-end read sequence data that has been generated according to the Earth Microbiome Project sequencing protocol. See Importing data for details about importing this data type. This type is currently defined in the q2-demux plugin, but in the future will likely be moved to q2-types.
TaxonomicClassifier: A trained classifier that can be used for performing taxonomic assignment on sequences. This type is defined in the q2-feature-classifier plugin.