bids-standard
"Sidecar" missing from definitions
Permalink to current version (1.10.0): https://bids-specification.readthedocs.io/en/v1.10.0/common-principles.html#definitions
In looking through the specification preparing a wave of posts on the Inheritance Principle, it seems that not only is the term "sidcar" missing from the list of definitions, but also---just like "entity" in the past (#947)---different people may be using the same term to mean different things:
- Is any key-value metadata JSON file a "sidecar"?
- Is a "sidecar" specifically a key-value metadata JSON file that has exactly the same filename stem as a data file, differing only in file extension?
In the presence of the Inheritance Principle, these two definitions are not the same.
As far as the schema and validator are concerned, the "sidecar" is the collection of keys and values aggregated through the inheritance principle. So I would say a sidecar file is any JSON file that provides metadata for another file, as opposed to for the dataset as a whole (like dataset_description.json or genetic_info.json).
