BIDS, aslcontext.tsv and inheritance

The ASL section of the BIDS spec calls for a *_aslcontext.tsv file that identifies the volume type of each volume in an ASL nifti file. In our case, the information in this aslcontext.tsv will always be the same, so I thought I’d take advantage of the inheritance principle and put it at the top level of the dataset directory. Unfortunately, when I do this the bids validator (v1.6.2) tells me that “Files with such naming scheme are not part of the BIDS specification.” Is this a bug in the validator, or is there some reason that the inheritance principle is disallowed for aslcontext.tsv files? (The same file passes validation just fine if I name it sub-_ses-_aslcontext.tsv and put it in the perf folder with the nifti file.)

This use case seems reasonable to me. Would you mind opening an issue on the spec to add some clarifying language? If the consensus is that the inheritance principle should apply, then we can update the validator.

Done: aslcontext.tsv and inheritance · Issue #749 · bids-standard/bids-specification · GitHub

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