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tools:metadata:index

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Metadata

Information accompanying numeric data

  • Data without metadata are useless.
    Both are intrinsically tied to each other.
  • During data acquision, a maximum of information is available.
    Extracting the relevant information is the real challenge.
  • Metadata should allow processing and analysis routines
    to acquire a “semantic understanding”.
  • Metadata should be stored in a structured way
    and be readable for both, humans and computers.
  • File formats for storing metadata should be platform independent
    and as simple to use as possible.

Numeric data without accompanying metadata are useless – it's really that simple. The very minimum would be axis labels and the information where the data originated from and what they represent (e.g., measurements of a sample with some method or results from some calculations).

The information available is maximal during data acquisition – regardless of whether this means experiments or calculations. The real challenge is to reduce the available information to a sensible set of parameters.

Furthermore, metadata allow processing routines to get a “semantic understanding”. This means that the information contained in the metadata needs to be stored and organised in a hierarchical fashion, most probably using key-value stores.

Metadata should be organised and stored in a way accessible to both, humans and machines. This necessitates a (file) format that is platform-independent and as easy to use as possible.

Which tool to use

Note: This section is clearly opinionated. There are definitely other tools available. However, this is the tool the author recommends from own experience.

YAML
A machine-readable format that is very easy to write manually (by humans).

tools/metadata/index.1548796486.txt.gz · Last modified: 2019/01/29 22:14 by till