MMI Project Status

What's happening with the MMI project?

The MMI project was first funded by the National Science Foundation in 2004. Today it continues to provide guidance, vocabularies and semantic services, with regular updates on events and news of interest to the community. Our continued popularity is confirmed both by page visits, and steady streams of positive comments, many to the tune of "MMI is essential, we need to keep it going."

As some of you know, MMI has completed its latest NSF funding cycle, and is exploring funding opportunities. The sites (this one, and the ORR Semantic Repository are on-line with hosting support from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. The sites are technically minded by MMI team members from MBARI, UC San Diego's OOI Cyberinfrastructure project, and other volunteers. We continue to maintain professional guidance for vocabulary creation and maintenance, and many community vocabularies in our semantic repository, among many other assets.

Community members continue to update the web site through event entries, blog posts, twitter feeds, and news and content contributions. Community contributions are always welcome—MMI is a great place to capture your knowledge of marine metadata so that everyone can use it! Please contact us if you want any information about how to participate, individually or as a group.

To the future

Where to now for MMI? The answer will depend on the community and members like you, and we expect a positive outcome.

We know MMI and its services are admired, valued, and used by the oceanographic community. NOAA's IOOS program and NSF's OOI program have both valued MMI highly, particularly its semantic services. (In fact, our Technical Lead and Project Lead are both funded significantly or wholly by the OOI Cyberinfrastructure project.) So we are confident that MMI will go on.

We know many ways to improve our services, and have explored funding sources (including proposals to NSF) with that in mind. We have engaged European project leaders with innovative programs as well. (We are exploring other interesting avenues as well, but no one direction leads clearly to funding.)

So we have community interest, MMI project interest, and many extremely strong ideas for project advancement. There are multiple possible funding paths; most will require the commitment of one or more principals to drive proposals and plans forward.

In conclusion

MMI has a great history, great content and services, and best of all, an engaged community of advocates and volunteers. This makes its future bright. We encourage you to make MMI what you value most, and we will do everything we can to support that.

Thanks for your interest in MMI, we look forward to talking with you soon.

John Graybeal and Carlos Rueda, for the MMI Steering Team and Community