Are you taking your Metadata seriously?

摘要

As spectroscopists we tend to focus on spectra. Nothing new there then, but maybe we need to be paying more attention to the information surrounding our measurements which define the context and relevance of the data and in many cases the fundamental ability to display the spectra correctly.| must admit to having somewhat neglected the creation and fate of metadata in all the data handling and migration work we have carried out over the years. It was occasionally funny to see certain spectrometer manufacturers using the ##OWNER= field in JCAMP-DX files to claim they owned the spectra we were creating and to be honest we pretty much ignored this when helping the vendors to get the actual data migrations compliant to the standards. However, there are increasing demands on scientists to upload accompanying data with their peer-reviewed papers, companies to make better use of the big data and machine learning tools are becoming ever more accessible. This means it is the metadata which gives meaning to the measured spectra and it is the metadata which will probably outlive the original creator of the spectra and almost certainly the organisations within which the data were created. In a world where digital rights management is ever more important, do you really want to leave the ownership of your data in the hands of your instrument vendor?