International Multidisciplinary Metadata Workshop 18 January Rebecca Koskela Arctic Region Supercomputing Center

Transcription

1 Metadata: A Means to Manage Ecological Data International Multidisciplinary Metadata Workshop 18 January 2007 Rebecca Koskela Arctic Region Supercomputing Center

2 Why Should You Create Metadata?

3 Data Entropy Time of publication Information Content Accident Specific details General details Retirement or career change Death Time (Michener et al. 1997)

4 Long Term Ecological Research The Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network is a collaborative effort involving more than 1800 scientists and students investigating ecological processes over long temporal and broad spatial scales. The National Science Foundation established the LTER program in 1980 to support research on long-term ecological phenomena in the United States. The 26 LTER Sites represent diverse ecosystems and research emphases

5 Ecological Metadata Language (EML) Metadata standard developed by the ecological community for the ecological discipline Originally developed at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and now a community-based project Implemented as a series of XML document types Each EML module is designed to describe one logical part of the total metadata that should be included with any ecological dataset

6 Goals of EML Address lack of dataset documentation Provide structure to traditionally unstructured information Aid transition toward synthetic research Enable both human-readable and machinereadable metadata Enable long-term archives Simple transfer format ascii text document Conform to accepted Internet-based standards for the implementation of EML (XML, XML Schema)

7 eml A Simple EML Example packageid: knb-lter-bnz.89.1 system: knb dataset title: Relative Humidity at LTER weather stations: Daily creator individualname contact surname: Hollingsworth positionname: Data Manager (Adapted from: Mark Servilla, 2005)

8 EML Module Organization EML is the top-level container Four thematic modules Single resource module that is available to other modules eml dataset citation software protocol (From: Mark Servilla, 2005) resource

9 Resource Module Provides for reuse of common information title creator resource title creator publication date abstract keywords distribution coverage geographic temporal (From: Mark Servilla, 2005) taxonomic

10 Dataset Module Specific to the description of experimental data dataset contact methods project access 0-n choices of datatable spatialraster spatialvector storedprocedure view (From: Mark Servilla, 2005) otherentity

11 Citation Module Specific to the description of a citation citation article book chapter editedbook manuscript report thesis conferenceproceedings personalcommunication map generic (From: Mark Servilla, 2005) audiovisual presentation

12 Software Module Specific to the description of software software implementation dependency 0-n choices of version access license licenseurl project (From: Mark Servilla, 2005)

13 Protocol Module Specific to the description of scientific protocol protocol proceduralstep access (From: Mark Servilla, 2005)

14 EML Tools

15 Morpho Desktop application Client for dealing with Metacat server Written in Java Can be run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS Open source (GNU GPL) (Adapted from: Saurabh Garg, 2005)

16 What does Morpho do? Create EML data packages Import data in to a data packages Save the data packages both locally and over the network Search for data packages both locally and over the network Open and edit data packages Export data packages (Adapted from: Saurabh Garg, 2005)

17 Morpho

18 Related Metadata Standards Dublin Core Element Set Corresponds roughly to eml-resource Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM) Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Corresponds to eml-spatialraster, eml-spatialvector,emlspatialreference Overlaps in other modules (eml-resource) Biological Data Profile (BDP) of the CSDGM Biological Data Working Group of the FGDC Shares structure for taxonomiccoverage, geologicage, and ascii table structures ISO Geographic information: Metadata Incorporated in the eml-spatial* modules Eml-party derived from ISO Darwin Core Partially overlaps with eml-coverage Geography Markup Language (GML) (From: knb.ecoinformatics.org)

19 Conversion among Standards EML represents a superset of: BDP CSDGM ISO (possibly) Dublin Core Theoretically can convert from EML to those Extensive overlap among all of these standards

20 EML Documentation: URLs EML Handbook: EML FAQ: /eml-faq.html EML documentation: EML Tools: Morpho: