Recent Metadata Community News

MMI had a strong presence again at AGU this year, and offers its readers some helpful tips and access to content.

We have collected references to a number of abstracts that are written by MMI contributors and/or address key metadata issues. This page references abstracts from MMI contributors, a list of MMI-related AGU presentations that we have posted on this site, an itinerary of all data management and semantic presentations at AGU, and other useful references.

Please feel free to contact the authors for more information on their material!

IEEE is offering a unique opportunity to participate in this year's e-Science conference, taking place December 7–11, 2008 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA. Members of the e-Science community are invited to participate in live-webcasts, dynamic chat sessions, conference blogs—even Twitter.

A number of oceans-related and metadata-related sessions will be presented.  Sessions with a dynamic web presence include the following:

Streaming Data Exploration and Visualization through Science Workflows and Provenance
International Grid Interoperability and Interoperation Workshop 2008 (IGIIW 2008)
Semantic-Driven Data Intensive Flows in the Clouds
Semantics - the Silver Lining of Cloud Computing
Adding Value to Data - Digital Repositories in the e-Science World
Complete schedule available online

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.

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.

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