Contributing Metadata
Introduction
A common process carried out by data analysts involves curating or standardizing the phenotypic information about samples. It is common practice to identify experimental confounders that influence the data. We refer to the phenotypes or other variables relevant for a given data entity as their metadata. In general metadata from a single individual or lab is designed to adhere to a set of internal standards. The process we developed is designed to standardize contributed metadata to the controlled vocabulary defined by the Synapse ontology.
Synapse Ontology
The Synapse Ontology is a resource being developed at Sage Bionetworks. We have embraced the concept of an ontology due the existence of other biomedical ontologies made available through the NCBO. At this point our ontology is available both from our internal subversion repository and through the web services provided by NCBO. We intend to develop this ontology further over the coming months.
How to Curate Metadata
When available we've obtained raw (not curated) metadata for each study. These data are stored as tab-delimited files within each study. For example, if you navigate to the study entity in the Synapse UI for study GSE8218 (syn26348) you will see the GSE8218_metadata entity (syn317560). The video below shows how to curate the metadata for this study.