Need your data to remain useful and discoverable over its entire lifespan? Metadata is the key.

Metadata—or data about data—and its importance in life sciences research will be the discussion topic at an upcoming webinar featuring RENCI’s Dan Bedard, Interim Executive Director of the iRODS Consortium, Stephen Worth, director of Global New Business Development Operations at EMC, and Patrick Combes, Principal Life Sciences Solutions Architect in EMC’s Emerging Technologies Division.

The webinar—titled Expanding the Face of Metadata in Next Generation Sequencing—takes place Wednesday, May 13 at 2 p.m. and should offer insights for life sciences researchers, bioinformatics specialists, software developers, and IT and research computing experts. To register, click here.

It’s common knowledge that life sciences data, including sequenced genomes, medical imagery, and mass spectrometry data, are growing exponentially and promise to transform research and medicine. But without useful metadata that has been carefully catalogued, accessing and using data stored in petabyte-scale repositories becomes a hit-or-miss process at best. Also, just like data storage hardware and software, and the scientific instruments that capture data, the concept of metadata, how to create it, and use it, continues to evolve.

The iRODS Consortium sees metadata as both a challenge and an opportunity, and Consortium Leader Bedard will explain how members are working together to capture, manage, and use metadata to enable life sciences research workflows.

If you’ve had metadata on the mind lately, if you’re interested in best practices for preserving and managing research metadata, or if you yearn for a glimpse of the future of metadata management in the life sciences, then plan to tune in for what should be a forward-looking, thought-provoking roundtable discussion.

-Karen Green