Digital data that lacks a coherent, stable, discoverable, and reproducible structure is irrelevant to the research process. Improperly or inadequately documented data files represent meaningless numbers, valueless and, ultimately, discardable. One of the significant advances over the past 20 years has been the increased use of descriptive metadata, facilitating the use and value of these data, offering greater discoverability and preliminary exploration. These changes have been part of an evolving process over the past 50 years, roughly categorized into four phases 1) The tabular paper phase, 2) The tape and mainframe phase, 3) The CD and personal computer phase, and 4) The internet distribution phase. This application argues that the broad adoption of best practices for data management, data sharing, and team science remain stalled in Phase 4. The phenomenal growth in data resources has made access to individual research data on aging simpler than ever before. Unfortunately, effective data sharing, even in light of the increased access provided by the Internet, cannot be fully realized without detailed metadata linkages that describe classes of data that share related concepts, constructs, and variables across multiple data waves or multiple related studies. This fifth phase, the interoperability phase, represents the next essential transition to support aging research for multidisciplinary team science.