Understanding metadata functional requirements in genome curation work

Abstract

The proliferation of genomic data and their widespread data reuse pose new challenges to effectively manage and curate genomic data. This study contributes towards better understanding of 156 genomics scientists' perception and priorities for metadata functional requirements in genome curation work. Our study was guided by previously identified twenty two metadata functional requirements (Willis, Greenberg, & White, 2012), and intended to define a context-sensitive model of groupings for metadata goals in genome curation. Analysis of the results revealed that genomics scientists recognize specific sets of metadata functional requirements in the genome-curation context. These metadata goals were reduced to six factor constructs. The rankings of these constructs in decreasing order are Portability, Reusability, Manipulability, Sufficiency, Interoperability, and Modularity. The findings indicated that genomics scientists need both domain independent and dependent metadata functional requirements that are primarily related to data comparison, integration, and reuse across platforms and databases. The constructs defined by this study advance the understanding of metadata requirements and their relationships. In addition, the resulting metadata requirement model can serve as a valuable resource to genome scientists, data curators and administrators for designing metadata schemes and developing data-curation policies.

"They're all going out to something weird"

“…Pellegrini [42,43] considers one of the key challenges in the generation of effective metadata to be the tension between its technical articulation and the language used to refer to it in non-expert communities. Meanwhile Huang & Qin [29] extend the issues beyond interoperability to matters such as 'portability, reusability, manipulability, sufficiency, and modularity' (see also [21]). Meyernik [38] conducted ethnographic studies of scientists to uncover what he believes to be 4 key issues in handling metadata across various workflows: the problem of who is actually responsible for its creation; the tension between standards and local ad hoc practices; the distribution of metadata knowledge around organisations; and the role metadata might play at different points within different workflows.…”