Metadata Guides for Smarties

1
Metadata Guides for Smarties
ltMMI /gt
OS45D-36
L E Bermudez1, J Graybeal 2, R Lowry, N
Galbraith, K Stocks, S Watson, R Arko, Feb
2006 1bermudez_at_mbari.org, 2graybeal_at_mbari.org
Marine Metadata Initiative URL
http//marinemetadata.org Email
ask_at_marinemetadata.org
Metadata Definition and Issues
A Guide to Sharing Data
Metadata is data about data and answers what,
when, where, how, who and why of the described
data. It also helps to discover, access,
evaluate and use data.
Reasons for sharing data
Encourage others to re-use your data, citing your
research. Your number of publications and
citations will increase.
Comply with requirements of funding agencies,
data centers and publishers.
Others can help you solve similar problems, find
anomalies in your data and/or complement it.
Metadata issues
IOOS sea level GCMD sea level rise CF
sea_surface_height_above_geoid
Example
Incomplete
Semantically inconsistent
Distributed and disconnected
Syntactically incompatible
Making your data publicly available
Because of
Because of
Because of
MarineXML
NetCDF
Because of
OPenDAP
CF COARDS
Lack of a metadata standard for specific domains
FGDC
Large number of collectors in different
organizations
Variety of software and formats
WMO Codes
Different world perceptions
GeoTIFF
SOAP
REST
Adapted from Bermudez L. E. and M. Piasecki
(2003). "HOW Hydrologic Ontology for the Web".
Poster AGU Conference, San Francisco, CA.
ISO
Consider your data consumers (e.g., journal
archive, data center) requirements for
vocabularies, transport protocols, content
standards and file formats.
MMI provides best practices, tools, easy-to-use
guidelines and recommendations, making this task
easy for non-experts.
Verify that your metadata is discoverable
Scientists should spend more time working on
their research.
Scientists spend too much time documenting their
own data sets and trying to decipher other
scientists data sets that they want to use.
Register your metadata and data
Participating in the MMI
The mission of the MMI is to promote the
exchange, integration and use of marine data
through enhanced data publishing, discovery,
documentation and accessibility.
Ways you can participate
http//marinemetadata.org
Validate your metadata

• Register and contribute to the site so you help
  build the community resource.
• Participate in and/or co-host a workshop that
  teaches how to handle your kind of data
  (info_at_marinemetadata.org).
• Participate in the interoperability
  demonstration as a data provider
  (marinemetadata.org/tethys). This will start
  building tools that can integrate your data with
  other data for new science uses.
• Test, provide feedback and contribute to our
  guides (marinemetadata.org/guides) to help make
  sure they are useful.
• Participate in our mailing list
  ask_at_marinemetadata.org, asking questions or
  helping others to solve them.

Collect all the information available that
documents your data and prepare your data and
metadata to meet your requirements based on the
recommendations and best practices.
FGDC 1.1 Identification Information 1.1.8
Citation Information 1.1.8.1 Originator 1.1.8.2
Publication Date 1.1.8.4 Title 1.1.8.5 Edition
CF sea_surface_height_above_geoid

• Publish and manage online documentation about
  your project at MMI (info_at_marinemetadata.org),
  facilitating collaboration with your project
  members and exposing your project to all the MMI
  community.

SSH_1
My ASCII Format
NetCDF
Map your attributes, source names, flags and
other codes to a common set of terms. This will
help users to understand in a common language the
content of your data. The Web Ontology Language
(OWL) is a tool that can be used to facilitate
the process.
Acknowledgements
Convert to standard formats.
Describe your data according to the selected
metadata standard.
Ongoing funding for this project is provided by
the National Science Foundation through grant
ATM-0447031. Major contributions to the project
are being provided by SURA, the Southeastern
Universities Research Association, and SCOOP, the
SURA Coastal Oceans Observing Program, with funds
provided in part by ONR, the U.S. Office of Naval
Research. A significant bridge funding grant has
been provided by NOAA's Coastal Services Center.
Further support has been provided by the Monterey
Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the David and
Lucile Packard Foundation.