MMI leads many projects to further its mission, often coordinating the contributions of volunteers from many institutions. If you want to help, or even take responsibility for a project that interests you, we welcome your contribution.

The following paragraphs outline a number of the more prominent and active MMI projects. You can visit the links at the end of this page to learn about more of our projects, and about opportunities to take on responsibility for improving metadata interoperability.

Significant MMI Projects

Guides

The Guides Team leads the development of the MMI Guides, a set of guidance documents that introduce readers to all aspects of metadata and good practices.

References

The Web Team and Technical Team collaborate on the discovery and addition of references to MMI's collection of metadata references. References to vocabularies, standards, best practices, organizations, and projects are collected on the site. Any user may contribute an additional reference via the Add Content to Site menu selection.

Semantic Framework

The Ontology Repository team has developed an ontology repository and associated semantic framework that can be used by the marine science community to store, manage, and work with its scientific vocabularies. The community is contributing heavily to the requirements and testing for this project.

Ontology Development: Platforms and Devices

The Ontologies team is working on ontologies for both Platforms and Devices, and collects references to similar efforts elsewhere.

OOSTethys

The MMI OOSTethys Team helped initiate the OOSTethys Project, working in a collaboration with SURA participants to create much of the initial framework. The OOSTethys Project continues to grow, and is particularly well represented by the graphic interface created by the OpenIOOS team on their web site. Please visit the OOSTethys web site for more information and to join the project.

Additional MMI Project Activities

Tools DIVE

MMI intends to advance its references collection and the way we present those references to the community. The Tools DIVE Team has set out to systematically Discover, Interrogate, and Validate information about metadata tools, and Educate the community about the results. Advanced classification criteria are being developed in the Resource Selection activity. With community support, the Tools DIVE will provide a new level of sophistication in publication of metadata references.

Community Projects

Many other projects are being led by the community and hosted on the MMI web site. Examples include the Expedition Metadata projects, the Metadata-Temperature (META-T) activity, and many others. These projects all encourage community participation and engagement. You can see a current list of these projects, with links to the individual projects and their leadership.

Internal Project Teams

Many MMI teams act behind the scenes, coordinating the varied MMI tasks, participants, and organizations. From strategic planning and project management to reporting and community outreach, these efforts give their participants a chance to set the direction of MMI, and contribute directly to its success. We maintain an up-to-date list of the MMI internal teams, with links to the projects themselves and their leaders. Please do not hesitate to contact us with your questions and contributions!

Proposal Opportunities

MMI regularly has more proposal ideas than we have time to pursue. If you think you'd like to lead a proposal submission that advances the MMI mission, we may be able to help! Either by supporting your MMI-aligned proposal ideas, or by providing our ideas that you adopt, the MMI project is extremely open to collaboration. Please contact us with your interest in moving the MMI mission forward.