[Feature]: Export a machine readable standardized output format of the GHG records

[JosuaCarl]

Describe the feature

The exported file should follow some kind of international standard way of reporting the emissions to align the program with the FAIR principles of interoperability and reusability.

Use case(s):

When other software wants to reliably access our output.

Suggested implementation:

?

[nadnein]

I think it would be more important for now that the output is in the same format as similar tools

[JosuaCarl]

Do you have any examples from other tools?

[JosuaCarl]

A way to standardize the output would be to provide something similar to Nextflow's

trace {
    raw = true
}

for our trace file. Then the parameters would be machine-readable on the task level.

[mashehu]

Hi, i am currently adding nf-co2footprint metadata to the nf-core website. how would this be different to what is already in co2footprint_summary_.txt?

[JosuaCarl]

Currently, the #313 does not change the output format, but we will likely choose something easily parseable with a tree structure (like JSON or YAML). I added the tree structure representation of data to the plugin, so it is stackable, i.e. making it easier to accumulate runs within institutes/ projects /... The new representation also aims to always provide the metrics together with their units and scale to avoid conversion problems, and a readable representation for easy access and skimming of results.

Edit: I removed a concrete example of a possible YAML file, because the standard we will be following is not yet fixed.