Recent Metadata News

In their paper published last month in Deep-Sea Research II, Baker and Chandler (2008) describe twelve strategies for managing complex ocean data systems.

Ontologies—Tools—Web Services: Alone, each is powerful. Combined in a system, they can form a comprehensive Semantic Framework. MMI, in collaboration with our partners, has developed a set of tools into a user-friendly system for data providers and users. This Semantic Interoperability workshop is your opportunity to learn from our efforts.

In recognition of the 10th anniversary of Google, Nature Magazine presents a look at big data. Many of the articles point to the inundation of data, and demonstrate the need for tools like the semantic web. Just as Google transformed the way we search web content, the semantic web will present innovative ways to store, find, and use scientific data. The semantic web, while virtually invisible, facilitates organization of data in a machine-readable fashion. This organization enables diverse datasets to be connected, using metadata.

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. For some time, OOSTethys experimented with interoperable data services for this purpose, and its companion project the Ocean Sciences Interoperability Experiment (OceansIE) was created to investigate the use of OGC Web Feature Services (WFS) and OGC Sensor Observation Services (SOS).

The recently released Phase I report presents best practices and lessons learned from this investigation.

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.