Welcome to the Marine Metadata Interoperability Project
"Promoting the exchange, integration and use of marine data through enhanced data publishing, discovery, documentation and accessibility."
Our goal is to support collaborative research in the marine science domain, by simplifying the incredibly complex world of metadata into specific, straightforward guidance. MMI hopes to encourage scientists and data managers at all levels to apply good metadata practices from the start of a project, by providing the best guidance and resources for data management, and developing advanced metadata tools and services needed by the community.
MMI can help make it easier for you to find, access, and use data sets from outside your own agency or institution, and to document, publish, and distribute your data. Our information starts at the most basic, and includes the most advanced. If you have a question, please ask us, so we can tell you and other members of the community.
MMI is a community-supported, collaborative effort. If you are not already a member, please consider joining us and contributing to our web site, our new Tools DIVE, or other working groups. This is an exciting time to be working on interoperable data systems, and with your participations MMI is moving community practices forward in standards, tools, and best practices.
MMI doesn't do everything
As wide as MMI ranges, some things are beyond us. (And some things we do not do yet.)
Data Storage and Cataloging. MMI eventually wants to describe existing repositories and catalogs for data, and plans to characterize them using our understanding of best practices. We've taken a step toward that with our Science Metadata training on Clearinghouses. But the MMI site does not contain any science data or metadata.
Define or Approve Standards. There are many standards organizations in the world, doing a fine job. We are trying to describe them so that you can tell the difference between them. (Occasionally MMI may start development of a community specification, like the Image Metadata Specification, but we do not make this a common practice.)
Reference Data Practices. Our focus is on metadata, and there is more than enough work in that arena to keep us busy. Sometimes we have to deal with data protocols in order to move the metadata practices forward—our support of OOSTethys is an example of using a data exchange protocol to demonstrate sophisticated metadata practices. But we try to keep the emphasis on the metadata.
Consumer Reports. Many people have asked us for Consumer Report-style recommendations on metadata standards, vocabularies, tools, and other resources. We would love to be smart enough, and well-funded enough, to give everyone the answers they are looking for. But there are challenges:
- Just understanding all the different metadata resources that are useful for marine science is an improbably challenging task.
- To evaluate those resources, we would need to keep track of a lot of data about each one. (We are experimenting with tools to help us do this.)
- Resources evolve on a regular basis, and standards are further supplemented by profiles and extensions that are even more customized, detailed, and (sometimes) arcane.
- The most appropriate metadata standards and resources for a particular project are likely to be strongly affected by the nature of that project, and the organizations supporting it.
- There will be a lot of arguments with any conclusion we reach.
