- Course overview
- Search within this course
- What is data management?
- Why should I share my data?
- EMBL-EBI data resources
- What is a biocurator?
- Open access publishing
- Check your learning
- Real-world scenario
- Your feedback
- Get help and support
- Further learning
- References
All materials are free cultural works licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, except where further licensing details are provided.
Adding structure to data
To understand biological data, we don’t just need the data itself, but also all the information that goes along with it, for example:
- Biological background
- Experimental aims
- Wet lab and analysis protocols
- Experimental variables
- Sample annotation
- Raw and processed datafiles
- The data submitter and contact details
- Related papers
All this information is known as metadata. But different people have different ideas about what metadata should be included and in what format, so metadata can get messy!
In this video, Sarah Morgan, Scientific Training Coordinator at EMBL-EBI, discusses what metadata is and why it is important to keep track of this information in biological experiments.
|
|
At the end of the video, Sarah asks “How many ways can you think of to say ‘female’?” How many can you think of? Here’s some to get you started: woman, girl, female patient…To help avoid messy metadata, we can adhere to ontologies to help with the structure of metadata. Continue to the next page to learn more about ontologies.