Data management and data integration are fundamental problems in the life sciences. Advances in molecular biology and molecular medicine are almost u- versallyunderpinned by enormouse?orts in data management, data integration, automatic data quality assurance, and computational data analysis. Many hot topics in the life sciences, such as systems biology, personalized medicine, and pharmacogenomics, critically depend on integrating data sets and applications producedby di?erent experimentalmethods, in di?erent researchgroups, andat di?erent levels of granularity. Despite more than a decade of...

Data profiling refers to the activity of collecting data about data, {i.e.}, metadata. Most IT professionals and researchers who work with data have engaged in data profiling, at least informally, to understand and explore an unfamiliar dataset or to determine whether a new dataset is appropriate for a particular task at hand. Data profiling results are also important in a variety of other situations, including query optimization, data integration, and data cleaning. Simple metadata are statistics, such as the number of rows and columns, schema and datatype information, the number of distinct...