Demonstration Video Transcript
Technology has fundamentally changed the way researchers do science. In ages past, hand-written records served as the basis for transformational findings. Today, most marine scientists are inundated with digital data. Dissemination of that data becomes mired in a tangled web of copyright, metadata, technological barriers, and a myriad of distributed interfaces. Scientists routinely field email, phone and hard-copy requests for data, and for the information that is used in data analysis. Funding agencies have established mandates, but often offer little or no practical help for scientists, data managers, or technologists. Every researcher will inevitably face the digital conundrum of science – how and where to publish which data sets?
As if this publishing paradigm wasn’t confusing enough, various organizations have established standards for metadata. So, before I can even consider publishing my data, I have to figure out how to format my supporting metadata, and what types of descriptive information I need to include.
As you can probably imagine, you’re not alone! The Marine Metadata Interoperability project, called MMI, is a collaboration of scientists, data managers, and technologists who have experience navigating the complex world of marine metadata. We have worked through the technical logistics of collecting data, creating formal metadata, and publishing both data and metadata.
MMI maintains a collaborative web environment for all international members, and provides forums for discussion of diverse topics related to marine data management. MMI is also developing web applications and stand-alone tools to enable sophisticated interactions between marine data systems.
One of MMI’s most active projects, OOSTethys, is a collaboration with the Southeastern Universities Research Association, or SURA. OOSTethys provides data producers with technology to publish metadata-rich data streams. Using the open-source technology software available on the OOSTethys web site, you can use the prototype mediator to distribute your data with standards-compliant metadata, which is then published in several IOOS web interfaces.
The process is actually quite simple. You download a cookbook, which is basically a set of instructions and accompanying code to help you publish your data and metadata. Cookbooks are available in PERL (ASCII or RDBMS), PYTHON and JAVA so you can pick the programming language with which you are most comfortable. Then, follow the enclosed documentation to register your metadata. This essentially tells the tool how to understand your metadata. Once you follow the instructions, which requires minor programming, and setup of your web server environment, you will have a web service running providing your data and metadata in a standard way. You could then tell your partners and anybody that needs your data that they could now access this data programmatically via your new service. You could also register your service in a registry, like the OOSTethys registry, or any other registry of services. Registering in OOSTethys will allow unknown users to view, discover and access your data, via the OOSTethys clients.
Using the tools available at OOSTethys, you can create standards-compliant metadata that provides ready access to your data using a persistent standards-compliant, metadata-rich protocol, so that any interested user can easily take advantage of it.
What you’ve seen here is a demonstration of one of the cookbooks available at OOSTethys. This project was recently approved as an OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) Ocean Science Interoperability Experiment (OCEANS IE), whose goal is to advance and guarantee that available specifications meet the needs of ocean observing systems. The OOSTethys development team continues to create new cookbooks, guidance material, and resources. OOSTethys promotes open source and free tools. Members of the marine metadata community are very welcome to join them.
The OOSTethys project, and MMI are constantly evolving. As a community of researchers and practitioners, we explore innovative solutions, and share our findings. MMI seeks to promote the exchange, integration and use of marine data through enhanced data publishing, discovery, documentation and accessibility.
We welcome your participation, and encourage you to explore the variety of resources available both at marinemetadata.org and oostethys.org.