Metadata Quality for Biobanks

Publication by BBMRI.at partner Alpen Adria University

For reproducible research high-quality samples are essential. However, also high quality data, are a prequisite for good research, because the “garbage in – garbage out” paradigm also accounts to data.

Since biobanks typically provide both biological material and data for medical research, this topic is also relevant for biobanks. They often have a role as data brokers, even though they are not responsible for the quality of the data itself, but for the quality of its representation.

The quality of biobank data and particularly of metadata (i.e. the data about the data), however, is currently neither properly defined nor investigated in depth.

In this publication, the BBMRI.at authors list the properties of biobanks that are most important for metadata quality management, and provide a set of metadata quality attributes and their metrics in a design science approach.

 

Shekhovtsov, V.A.; Eder, J. Metadata Quality for Biobanks. Appl. Sci. 2022, 12, 9578.