 Apart from these issues in biological ontology, there are also epistemological issues raised by metagenomics, namely the discrepancy between our ability to sequence DNA and to interpret it. These discussions about the challenges of DNA sequence interpretation are not just a problem for (meta)genomics and other -omics approaches, but also for biomedicine more generally and its push towards a truly personalised medicine. A key issue for this push is the discrepancy between the (ever-decreasing) costs of obtaining a personal genome sequence (Bennett et al. 2005; Mardis 2006; Check 2014a,b) and the high costs of making sure the data can be appropriately interpreted (Mardis 2006; Sboner et al. 2011; Phillips et al. 2015). This problem is related to the so-called ‘bioinformatic bottleneck’, the handling and the interpretation of the large amounts of sequence data that provides the main obstacle to progress (Green et al. 2011; Desai et al. 2012; Scholz et al. 2012; Marx 2013). In the days of next-generation sequencing the sequencing step itself is no longer the rate-limiting step.