Repositories in Profile – MassBank EU

For chemists, it is crucial to know the advantages of different data repositories in order to find the best fit for their research data requirements. Here, we provide a brief overview of MassBank EU as part of our series “repositories in profile”.

MassBank EU – High Quality Mass Spectral Database

Figure 1: Screenshot MassBank EU.

Basic information

❏      Homepage: https://massbank.eu/MassBank/

❏      Creation date: 2006

❏      Country: DE, JPN

❏      Domain: Chemistry, Life Science

❏      Usage: Open Access 

❏      Target group: Analytical chemists, metabolomics, biochemists, bioinformaticians

❏      User documentation: Is available on the website

❏      Number of datasets: https://massbank.eu/MassBank/RecordIndex

❏      Recommended by journals/societies: Official database of the Mass Spectrometry Society of Japan

❏      Listed in: re3data: r3d100011839, FAIRsharing: FAIRsharing.dk451a, bio.tools: massbank, Wikidata: Property:P6689 Q24088019, Identifiers.org: massbank, PubChem: Data Source ID: 23999

Functionalities and technical information

❏      Content: Mass spectral data of known, unknown and provisionally identified substances

❏      Content origin: From community users and projects

❏      Searchable content: Compound and mass spectrometry information, peaks

❏      Accepted data types: MassBank format

❏      Used standards/ontologies: Internal MassBank Record Format 

❏      Curation: Via MassBank record validator; GitHub issues 

❏      Access rights/license information/embargo: Copyright; individual licenses based on creative commons; no embargo

❏      AAI solution: GitHub (Read access uncontrolled, write access for allowed GitHub accounts)

❏      Persistent Identifier system: MassBank Record ID (Accession), USI (Universal Spectrum Identifier)

❏      Authority identifier system: No

❏      Interfaces: Interface for data import via Git (MassBank record format), interface for data export (JSON-LD), REST API

❏      Further functionalities/tools: RMassBank (separated data processing/analysis tool)