- Course overview
- Search within this course
- What is publicly available data?
- Examples of publicly available databases
- Licences and data reuse
- Programmatic access
- Sharing your data
- Further learning
- Your feedback
- 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.
Metadata
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
Metadata is just as important when you are using publicly available data.
There will be metadata included along with the data you access (figure 5), such as those described above, but you will also use and create new metadata during your use of the data, such as:
- Date of download
- Analysis protocol
- Processed datafiles
- Related papers
Plus your details if you go on to submit the analysed data anywhere!
Often the way metadata is provided will adhere to a specific kind of data standard. Learn more about data standards on the next page.