What is SOMA

The CELLxGENE Census is a data object publicly hosted online and a convenience API to open it. The object is built using the SOMA API and data model via its implementation TileDB-SOMA (documentation).

As such, the CELLxGENE Census has all the data capabilities offered by TileDB-SOMA and currently absent in the single-cell field, including:

• Cloud-based data storage and access.

• Efficient access for larger-than-memory slices of data.

• Data streaming for iterative/parallelizable methods.

• R and Python support.

• Export to AnnData and Seurat.

To get the most value out of the CELLxGENE Census it is highly recommended to be familiar with TileDB-SOMA capabilities. Please take a look at their documentation page.