Format

• File: The biom file format
  The BIOM file format (canonically pronounced biome) is designed to be a general-use format for representing biological sample by observation contingency tables. BIOM is a recognized standard for the Earth Microbiome Project and is a Genomics Standards Consortium candidate project.
  

• Date: ISO 8601
  In order to be properly detected, all date/time metadata must be standardized according to MIxS standardized format (more information at the Genomic Standards Consortium wiki), and entered into one column in your original sample metadata mapping file, as follows: [YYYY]-[MM]-[DD]T[hh]:[mm] Timezone Offset. For example, metadata for a sample collected at 2:30pm on May 4, 2007 would be entered as: 2007-04-05T14:30
  

• Location: Any geographic coordinates or GPS data must be entered as decimal degrees (the format used by GoogleMaps, e.g. -90.017926). We recommend using separate columns labeled “Latitude” and “Longitude” in your original sample metadata mapping file, to ensure that GPS metadata is correctly detected.
  

• Unit: Space between value and unit, e.g. 2421 m, instead of 2421 or 2421m
  

• For columns of numerical metadata values: Enter 'no_data' if there is no measurement available for a given sample (for example, columns listing temperature, pH, or other chemical measurements where a given value was not recorded for some samples). We do not recommend leaving a blank space, since this may lead to improper importing and formatting of metadata values.