Recent Metadata News

The first workshop in the series (Potentials and Limitations of Coastal Web Atlases), hosted by the Coastal and Marine Resources Centre (CMRC) at University College Cork, Ireland, examined state-of-the-art developments in coastal web atlases (CWAs) from the Europe and the U.S., shared several case studies and lessons learned, and established key issues and recommendations related to the design, data requirements, technology and institutional capacity needed for these atlases.

The second workshop (Coastal Atlas Interoperability), hosted by Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, focused on the specific challenge of access and exchange of coastal data, maps, and information via a common point, without the need to search aimlessly within separate atlases. In other words, how best to get these many atlases to truly interoperate ?

The Integrated Ocean Observing System has a new standards approval process for use by the community. Under this process, members of the community will submit data management standards for consideration by IOOS, and their submissions will be managed using a distributed web system integrating inputs from the IOOS Data Management and Communications team members all over the country. The system provides an ongoing site and process supporting evaluation and agreement on the standards to be used in IOOS.

The recently released DMAC Standards website is a new community tool, designed for distributed submission, review and recommendation of standards for the Integrated Ocean Observing System. The simple user interface facilitates involvement by the wider community, and enables status tracking, documentation submission, and enhanced electronic discussions. Future capabilities will be planned, as the community explores this new tool. Registration is open to the public, or you can log in as "Guest", to investigate the interface (note: this login provides limited functionality).

MMI hosted a successful kickoff telecon to begin developing device ontologies (ontologies are the hierarchical vocabularies that will be needed for Open Geospatial Consortium standards).

The netCDF Climate and Forcast (CF) conventions do not fully address the needs of users collecting point observation data. A group of people has formed to generate a proposal for a point observations data convention, to present to the CF committee.

OOSTethys participants initiated an OGC Interoperability Experiment in December 2006 to engage data managers and scientists in the Ocean-Observing community to advance their understanding and application of various OGC specifications, solidify demonstrations for Ocean Science application areas, harden software implementations, and produce candidate OGC Best Practices documents that can be used to inform the broader ocean-observing community.

The OOSTethys website describes developments in ocean-observing systems, with a focus on progress toward a system-of-ocean-observing-systems. OOSTethys provides a community-developed set of software tools that implement OGC specifications. It also offers guidance documents ("cookbooks") to help data providers get started using standards-based data-exchange capabilities.

See http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm07 for AGU Fall Meeting Information

Standards-Based Interoperability Among Tools and Data Services in the Earth Sciences

Community members are invited to participate in this first Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure: Information Management in eScience. Topics will be focused on Interoperability, Security, and Metadata Extraction.

The Marine Metadata Interoperability Project has announced the creation of a new feature on its web site. The marine metadata community news pages on the site. This feature will publish news releases and stories of general interest to the marine metadata community.