---
title: "Introduction to ExperimentHubData"
author: "Valerie Obenchain"
date: "Modified: August 2017. Compiled: `r format(Sys.Date(), '%d %b %Y')`"
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# Overview

`ExperimentHubData` provides tools to add or modify resources in 
Bioconductor's `ExperimentHub`. This 'hub' houses curated data from courses,
publications or experiments.  The resources are generally not files of raw data 
(as can be the case in `AnnotationHub`) but instead are `R` / `Bioconductor` 
objects such as GRanges, SummarizedExperiment, data.frame etc.  Each resource 
has associated metadata that can be searched through the `ExperimentHub` client interface.

# `ExperimentHub_docker`

The [ExperimentHub_docker](https://github.com/Bioconductor/ExperimentHub_docker)
offers an isolated test environment for inserting / extracting metadata records
in the `ExperimentHub` database. The README in the package explains how to
set up the Docker and inserting records is done with
`ExperimentHub::addResources()`.

In general this level of testing should not be necessary when submitting
a package with new resources. The best way to validate record metadata is to 
read inst/extdata/metadata.csv with `ExperimentHubData::readMetadataFromCsv()`.
If that is successful the metadata are ready to go.

