The ecological community needs "cyberinfrastructure that enables open, stable, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and logically organized data", says Bill Michener (LNO), lead-PI on a new NSF Interop Project (NSF Program Solicitation 07-565).
To address these needs the project will develop a prototype of a virtual data center to seamlessly interconnect the many existing biodiversity, ecological, and environmental data centers. Michener heads a list of collaborators from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USGS National Biological Information Infrastructure, National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Beginning in early 2009 the group will hold semi-annual week-long meetings to investigate the adoption and adapting of basic open system interoperability standards. In addition to the technical aspects of creating a virtual data center, a Community Engagement Working Group will bring together dozens of representatives from scientific societies and environmental observatories to address the socio-cultural issues of community-based interoperability networks.
Data catalog gets new keyword search
The LTER Data Catalog now has enhanced search capability, thanks to the direct efforts of John Porter (VCR) and Duane Costa (LNO) working through the LTER Information Management Committee Controlled Vocabulary working group. The Data Catalog's search box (http://metacat.lternet.edu) now does auto-completion with keywords and title words taken directly from the metadata documents in the metacat. While one or more controlled vocabularies for documenting LTER data sets are still in the works this intermediate step takes advantage of investments already made by site metadata authors.
New EML release expected
The first significant new release of Ecological Metadata Language (EML) since LTER's adoption of the standard is in the final stages of preparation before being made public in early 2009. The EML specification is now widely used in the ecological community and LTER scientists have been active in EML development, including Margaret O'Brien (SBC), who is acting coordinator for the new release. The upcoming EML 2.1.0 release addresses bugs which cause the schema, a structurally descriptive digital template, to be invalid with respect to Internet standards. Other enhancements represent significant improvements in EML. For example, several metadata elements were retyped to constrain their content, and in other cases to increase flexibility. In the literature schema two elements were made optional so that EML could accommodate articles-in-press.
For the most part, EML 2.1 does not include major new features, or require a shift in use or implementation. The release of the EML 2.1.0 schema is being coordinated with the releases of Morpho (EML management tool) and Metacat (XML database) so that documents written against the updated schema can be submitted as soon as possible. O'Brien observes: "There was a deliberate decision to balance the impact on instance authors with necessary schema maintenance, and to prepare the schema for the next phase of planned improvements and features." The new versions are all expected in early 2009.
Although the changes in EML 2.1.0 are small, they are nonetheless incompatible with documents authored under previous versions and will require changes to extant metadata documents. Document authors should see the 'Readme' that accompanies the distribution for a complete list of the bugs addressed (http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/software/eml/), usage information and examples. Existing EML 2.0-series documents can be converted to EML 2.1.0 using the XSL style sheet that accompanies the release.
If you or your site is involved in an LTER related informatics project that you would like highlighted in this column please send email to jbrunt@LTERnet.edu.