Introduction to Metadata and Ontologies: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Metadata and Ontologies (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Dataset · Fri Mar 27 04:00:00 EDT 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.25979/1607365· OSTI ID:1607365

Thompson, Luke ^[1]; Vangay, Pajau ^[2]; Blumberg, Kai ^[3]; Christianson, Danielle ^[2]; Dundore-Arias, Jose Pablo ^[4]; Hu, Bin ^[5]; Timme, Ruth ^[6]; Wood-Charlson, Elisha M. ^[2]

---

1. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boulder, CO (United States); LBNL NMDC
2. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
3. Univ. of Arizona, Tucson, AZ (United States)
4. California State Univ. (Cal State Monterey Bay), Seaside, CA (United States)
5. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
6. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), College Park, MD (United States)

Metadata are contextual data about your experimental data. Metadata are the who, what, when, where, and why of these data. Metadata puts these data into context. In microbiome research, metadata includes information about the sample: when it was collected, where it was collected from, what kind of sample it is, and what were the properties of the environment or experimental condition from which the sample was taken. Information about sample processing is also metadata: methods used to extract and purify molecules (e.g., DNA) from the sample, type of DNA sequencing or other ’omics analyses done, and where the raw experimental data are located. This documentation includes information on the following topics: What are metadata? What kinds of metadata are there? Why are metadata important? Why should metadata be standardized? Why should metadata be machine readable? What is an ontology? Why are ontologies important? What are some examples of ontologies? The documentation also includes further resources on metadata guides and tools and tips for formatting metadata for maximum utility.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). National Microbiome Data Collaborative (NMDC)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23)
• DOE Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 1607365
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION
FAIR Data Principles
data
experimental data
metadata
microbiome
ontology
processing
sample