Recent Metadata News

Unidata recently released the second generation UDUNITS package.  The UDUNITS-2 package provides support for units of physical quantities (e.g. meters, seconds). Its three main components are:

The Marine Metadata Interoperability Initiative is now a full member of the Federation for Earth Science Information Partners. 

From the Press Release

In the world of increasing web connectivity, data providers have a variety of options for representing and exchanging point data records from fixed in-situ marine platforms.

BioPortal allows users to browse, upload, download, search, comment on, and create mappings for ontologies.

This newly updated portal allows users to find ontologies based on a variety of criterion, including subject, concept, class name, and attribute. Users can also explore/download ontologies and mappings.

New features in BioPortal 2.0 include:

Looking for a tool to edit ISO19115 Metadata?  FGDC has published the results of a comprehensive review of these types of tools. The review was limited to ISO 19115 based metadata editors and does not include applications limited to:

- metadata standards other than ISO 19115, or
- metadata validation, distribution or other non-editor metadata operations.

New Ontology Registry under Development

MMI and SURA (Southeastern Universities Research Association) announce the development of a prototype Ontology Registry and Repository for Marine and Environmental Science ontologies.

The registry, which will store ontologies, ontology mappings, and metadata associated with those artifacts, is intended to be available for general scientific use by the end of 2008.

As marine science research collaborations increase, and the marine metadata community grows, more metadata managers are developing controlled vocabularies and using them in well-designed systems. However, when a colleague down the hall, up the road, in another state or another country describes similar data, they use a completely different set of terminology. So, how do two systems that use completely different terminology interoperate?

Once lower-level technical barriers like networking and transport protocols are overcome, the key to interoperability is semantic interoperability. And a major contributor to semantic interoperability will be vocabulary mappings. By developing vocabulary mappings—sets of rules that bridge between vocabularies—systems have the resources to interoperate based on a shared terminology.

It's great to have our new site on-line! We hope you find it really useful.

We have mostly finished working out significant bugs on the new site, and we thank you for your patience during the process.

There are still some links and content from the old site that are not fully accessible. We have a fair number of internal links that do not resolve (few compared to the total number of links; many more than we'd like). You may forward specific links that deserve attention, but we will get to most of these pretty soon.

We are posting a complete status of roll-out issues until most tasks are resolved.

By definition, metadata exists to describe data or information. Descriptive metadata enables appropriate use, and facilitates re-use of data. Once data has been discovered and used, it should be cited. Publications frequently reference data sets, but the question remains - how should authors cite data?

As part of its Data Policy, the International Polar Year (IPY) indicates

It's official.

The MMI project is no longer dependent on our original content management system, and is spreading its wings—and its capabilities—with a new underlying system, a new look and feel, and plenty of new information!

So, what's new on the site? Lots!