Presenting standards, tools, and solutions

MMI is an information clearinghouse, pointing you to existing technologies that relate to your technical activities. We reference many metadata solutions, providing contextual information on each, and will soon provide user ratings and personal experiences.

MMI describes three classes of technical metadata standards -- transport protocols, content standards, and vocabularies -- and provides pointers to key tools that are used to work with metadata. This information gives you a big head start on finding and understanding existing products and approaches to apply to your own metadata problems.

If you are providing environmental science data to customers, MMI can help you be more productive, providing scientifically valuable and technically sound advice. We are constantly working to improve on these goals, and invite you to share your expertise, your critiques, and your enthusiasm!

Identifying and addressing metadata challenges

Not every metadata challenge has an operational solution. In these cases, MMI serves as an advocate, a demonstrator, and a developer. We've provided tools to facilitate working with metadata, workshops to show some approaches in action, ontologies where none existed, and prototype software showing metadata used in an interoperable framework.

All of the software created by MMI is made publicly available (usually on SourceForge), our results are documented on the web site, and our experiences in our workshops are fully and openly described. The MMI community strives for transparency, even presenting some of its own projects on the MMI web site. Developers can easily reuse the solutions and ideas created by MMI in their own projects, and are encouraged to work with us to improve those results.

Guidance for your own data system development

MMI collects and develops guides on data management approaches. Starting with the most basic information, MMI is creating a comprehensive set of materials to help understand and work through metadata development challenges. This community effort is ongoing, and benefits from direct involvement of members of the community. If you would like to help us develop guides, or give us feedback on what is needed, please contact us.

Hosting and presenting your metadata-aware work (and work of your peers)

The best way to learn about technical material is from the work of others, and MMI represents this work in many places on the site. In addition to the standards and tools we document, MMI provides sections that publicly document the activities and progress of projects in the metadata community.

Anyone can take advantage of those areas to document their own project, and share the work with members of the project team. MMI has been used by large and small projects to represent the projects' activities in the community. The resulting publicity benefits the project, and the awareness of the project benefits the community. If you want to use this service for your metadata-related project, just contact MMI at the link below to make arrangements.

References on activities of interest to developers

The site contains a number of useful references on current activities. The most actively used are the events calendar and solicitations page. Community members are urged to post their own material, or send it to us for posting.

Summing Up

MMI provides a lot of information and useful results to you as a developer, and it also gives you the chance to become a publisher to the community. You can help us create a bigger and better MMI by becoming a member, and starting to create your own content on our site. Contact us for details!