Folker, Thanks for the reply - I am focused on a particular deliverable, so my comments are framed in that context as a use case: On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 11:01 AM, Folker Meyer <[email protected]> wrote:

- MetaZen is indeed a frontend to create spreadsheets (and prefill some fields) - The "schema" we devised is indeed implemented in a database allowing the queries. I use "schema" because it is a very lightweight solution more an overlay really.

A closer reading of the doc answered this for me, thanks for indulging my short attention span. Since the metadata solution is a lightweight overlay, and the metadata requirements seem to be driven by "meta-metadata" templates, it sounds like we could (relatively) easily use this as a metadata layer for other services. Is it being used for anything else currently, for example, to store the metadata for the Shock service?

- regarding Stephen's question about a single integrated query capability: the "schema" we use links IDs to metadata. I believe we need the ability to link all KBase objects (from narrative to metagenome reads etc.) to metadata. With many different lightweight "schemas" used along the way. If you look at the way the "schemata" are implemented, you will see they are suited for this. I'd say a single KBase ID needs to link to the only one object irrespective of location in KBase.

I think that a scheme for kbase wide object ids, and common metadata layer would be a vital first step to federating the data store silos.

I think one key question we have to ask ourselves is: Do we want to work with the international standards community (e.g. GSC) and expand on their "templates" or go our own way?

With MG-RAST we have chosen to work with the community (and are now part of this community), evolving standards and CVs where needed (sometimes too slow). For us that has produced the situation where users are happy to provide minimal data and many are asking for more metadata. We basically get the same number of complaints about too little and too much metadata --> must mean we did the right thing. ;-)

Metadata is comes out of how the data is used - and we are breaking some new ground in how the data is used (do the current communities have metadata that captures what the narrative interface use cases?) Steve