Associating data elements with metadata

Typically, one would use the tools described in this section to associate data elements with metadata just after the data has been imported. Doing this at this early stage means that analysis results generated using these inputs will often inherit the metadata association. This inheritance is done when the relevant association can be determined unambiguously.

Each association between a particular data element and a row in your Metadata Table will have a "role" label that indicates what the role of the data element has. For example, a newly import sequence list could be given a role like "Sample data", or "NGS reads". Each analysis tool provides a particular role label when applying a metadata association to the outputs it generates. For example, a read mapping tool could assign the role "Un-mapped reads" to a sequence list of unmapped reads that it produces. When viewing all the data associated with a given metadata entry, these roles can help distinguish the particular data elements of interest.

The metadata table must be saved before data association options are available to use.

To associate data elements with the rows of a Metadata Table, click the Associate Data button at the bottom of the Metadata Table view. When an metadata association is created for, or removed from, a data element, this change to the data element is automatically saved.

If a key column has been identified for the metadata table, two options will be available:

Each of these has benefits and restrictions. These are described at the top of each sections describing these options.


Subsections