[BioC] how to understand the concept metadata in bioconductor

[Steve Lianoglou]

Hi,

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 5:25 PM, Tim Triche, Jr. <tim.triche at gmail.com> wrote:
> By definition, if it's primary data (e.g. an annotation package's
> annotations), it's not metadata. Data about the data is metadata.  Depending
> on what you are treating as primary, there are times when then term can be
> highly ambiguous.
>
> However, the only times I have encountered anything explicitly labeled
> 'metadata' in BioC is when constructing or using annotations, and in these
> instances, it has always referred to information about provenance (where the
> annotations came from).  I have to believe this is an effort to reduce
> confusion.

In order to clarify (aka "muddy") things even more: there is also the
"metadata" that is accessible by `mcols` on various IRanges-derived
classes.

Thus my initial call for clarification re: context.

There is no universal answer to this question, except the one that Tim
already provided: metadata is data about meta.

Shan Gao: where are you seeing "metadata" (provide a link to some
documentation or something) so someone can answer this for you if
you're still confused.

-steve

-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
 | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
 | Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact