Last week, the Global Biodiversity Initiative Facility (GBIF) Secretariat launched the GBIF Community Site, a free social networking site to enhance communication among researchers, data publishers and users, and everyone interested in Biodiversity Informatics. All are welcome to join and "share information about events, open calls, product releases, [and] collaboration opportunities in biodiversity data." There are also a number of collaboration tools available in the site: work groups, (micro)blogs, community news, online chat, file and image sharing, to name a few. For more information, visit: http://www.gbif.org/communications/resources/platforms/gbif-community-site/. 

Several members of the MMI community have contributed to chapters in the new book Coastal Informatics: Web Atlas Design and Implementation, author(s)/editor(s): Dawn Wright (Oregon State University, USA); Ned Dwyer (University College Cork, Ireland); Valerie Cummins (University College Cork, Ireland), 2010. The book "reviews and presents the latest developments in the emerging field of coastal web atlases through a series of case studies." It also discusses "making underlying geographic databases interoperable." The Coastal Atlas Interoperability chapter (pp 53-79), co-authored by Karen Stocks and Anthony Isenor from the Guides Team as well as others, was formed in part from information in the MMI Guides that are available on our site.

Geospatial data that represent observations at a specific time and place often cannot be replicated, and explicitly preserving them helps ensure their availability for future users. In an effort to improve geospatial data preservation research and practice, researchers at the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University are developing an online clearinghouse to disseminate information on the preservation of geospatial data. They have put together a brief questionnaire that takes ten to fifteen minues to complete, and will help them address issues relating to this topic.

A team of three Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) researchers has shown the power of the semantic web by developing 40 applications that use datasets from different sources, all available to the public through Data.gov. Data.gov was launched a year ago and has grown from just 47 datasets to over 270,000 (as of May 2010). In June 2009, the RPI team saw Data.gov as a perfect opportunity to "use RDF (Resource Description Framework) and linked data" to explore government data in innovative ways. The RPI Project has demonstrated "how quickly and inexpensively visualization and mash-up applications can be built from government data when it’s put into a web-friendly form." Read the full article at Government Computer News (5/18/2010).

In October 2010, the National Science Foundation (NSF) will require scientists to complete data management plans, submitted as two-page supplementary documents, with all new proposals for NSF funding. This change to data sharing illustrates the importance of publicly funded research that is available to the public and accessible to broad scientific communities. "Science is becoming data-intensive and collaborative," noted Ed Seidel, acting assistant director for NSF's Mathematical and Physical Sciences directorate.

Complete details in the NSF Press Release 10-077 from May 10, 2010.

NEPTUNE Canada (North-East Pacific Time-Series Undersea Networked Experiments) is featured in NatureNews this month, "Undersea Project Delivers Data Flood" (20 April 2010). The NEPTUNE Project, with 800 km of cable connecting a suite of oceanographic instruments on the seafloor, will eventually receive an estimated "60 terabytes per year" of data. NEPTUNE scientists and data managers are "looking for innovative ways of crunching through the data" by making  information available to the public via the internet and collaborating with the international oceanographic community. Image Copyright © 2010 NEPTUNE Canada

This Special Report on Managing Information (25 February 2010) explores the "unimaginably vast amount of digital information" collected from a number of systems around the globe, and the complex issues that go along with archiving, accessing, managing, and securing enormous volumes of information. The report includes articles on how computers process our "world of big data", the need for international data rules, and new ways of visualizing data.

The latest place you can find MMI is on Twitter! WIth the member name of marinemetadata, MMI is ready to tweet and be tweeted at.  If you are already a Tweeter on Twitter, you can send your Tweets to us with @marinemetadata, and if you aren't, you can still watch the fun (just beginning!) at http://twitter.com/marinemetadata.

We look forward to hearing your news, ideas, and comments over this network. Please use it to tell the community about marine metadata news of interest to them!

The Data Observation Network for Earth (DataOne), supported by U.S. National Science Foundation, is inviting all scientists to participate in an on-line data assessment survey. The 23-question survey takes only 5-10 minutes to complete. Our "responses will help [them] better understand how scientists manage their data and will contribute to building better tools and processes for data preservation." For more information about the survey and to participate, visit http://vovici.com/wsb.dll/s/aaeg3cfe6. For more information about the DataONE foundation and their mission, visit About DataONE.