It is instructive to compare such a representation to popular alternatives in bioinformatics: file-based data format conventions and primitive data structures of a language such as matrices or spreadsheet tables. With file-based formats, operations such as subsetting or data transformation can be tedious and error prone, and the serialized nature of files discourages operations that require a global view of the data. In either case, validity checking and reflection cannot rely on preformed or standardized support and need to be programmed from scratch again for every convention—or are missing altogether. As soon as the data for a project are distributed in multiple tables or files, the alignment of data records or the consistency of identifiers is precarious, and interoperability is hampered by having to manipulate disperse, loosely coordinated data collections.
