The LTER Network Office (LNO) is gearing up for its second year of work as a partner in the Dryad project--a digital repository for data underlying scientific publications, with an initial focus on evolution, ecology, and related fields. Dryad is designed to manage the multitudes of data underlying published articles that would otherwise be scattered about, hard to find, or lost to science. It enables researchers to archive their data at the time of publication, dedicate it to the public domain, and get a citable Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for it. Thus, Dryad promotes the discovery and reuse of data by others.
Dryad is being developed by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) and the University of North Carolina Metadata Research Center, in coordination with a large group of journals and societies in evolutionary biology and ecology. NESCent is a joint effort of Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State University.
The Dryad project grant, funded by the National Science Foundation, includes a two-year subcontract award to LNO, the first year of which focused on completion of two specific software tasks:
- Metadata crosswalks between the Ecological Metadata Language (EML) and Dublin Core (DC); and
- Development of an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) that complies with the Metacat service interface to perform as both a "provider" and "harvester" service.
In the second year, LNO will participate in Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering (HIVE), an Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded project involving the Metadata Research Center and NESCent. HIVE will provide a dynamic approach to integrating discipline-specific controlled vocabularies that enable queries against one or more vocabularies to return Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)-formatted records for each term, including hierarchical (narrower and/or broader) and related terms.
Specifically, LNO will:
- Complete a metadata crosswalk from EML to the Dryad Application Profile;
- Provide the LTER Network's controlled vocabulary in SKOS format to the HIVE project, making LTER’s vocabulary one of the existing interdisciplinary vocabularies within the HIVE repository; and
- Develop prototypical applications that utilize the SKOS vocabulary content returned by HIVE, including an application to help discover metadata documents from the Metacat repository server and an application to assist in the generation of descriptive metadata documents.
This work is scheduled to end in September, 2010.