Yes, my opinion disagrees with what the group decided and was
therefore put in the GIFT Format document, that's okay.

Note that I am not talking to you explicitly John, I am stating
my opinion because I think it may be worth consideration by the
group. Again, I am hoping others will reply, too.

---

While there may be many cases where it is appropriate to carry
a specific MD value along, it is equally important to think of
the cases where it is not.

As another random example, consider the case of computing an
EPI time series, where the result is computed from the EPI data
masked by the intersection of 2 different atlas-based ROIs, and
the union or intersection of 5 statistical datasets, where they
exceed some threshold.

That would be 8 different datasets as input, and of 3 different
types. What MetaData should be in the output? Should it be the
union of all MD from all 8 inputs, or perhaps subject to unique
Name=Value pairs, or uniq Names? If Names should be unique, as
makes sense, which Value should be applied, while the other 7
are thrown out? After a few operations, a dataset could have
many hundreds of MD pairs in it, easily.

Also, how many of these identifiers will be meaningless, or even
misleading in the output dataset?

If 4 of these datasets have PubMed Identifiers, should the output
have one? Should it have all 4?

This does not seem very clear cut to me, and it does not seem
quite appropriate to simply pass any MetaData through.

- rick