Biosphere Data Project

Informatics: Protocols and Metadata

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Developing standards for structuring, indexing and sharing environmental information is essential to enhance our ability to address a wide range of global issues in environmental policy and human health. Shared metadata standards are being developed and refined by many of the organizations and projects linked on this page in order to further this process.

The complexity of the problem is such that there is a great deal of important work still to be done.

Metadata sites in the Environmental and Life Sciences

Note: many of the sites on the main project page, such as ICE and NBII, also contain metadata resources

CERES is an environmental indexing and thesaurus project of the California Resources Agency
NASA's Global Master Change Directory indexes and describes environmental data sets
The Environmental Data Registry of the US EPA
The Global Information Locator Service (GILS)
Directories and Metadata - Environment Australia's page focuses on geospatial data issues
Metadiversity - Biodiversity Metadata Conference proceedings from NFAIS, November 9-12, 1998
Taxonomic Authority Files Workshop on managing species-level biological data, June 22 - 23, 1998
Species 2000 project
Selected References on Metadata is up-to-date; it references some sources that are not available online

More General Metadata Resources

Digital Libraries: Metadata Resources
An overview of current Metadata Projects and Standards
Metadata Page of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)
Thoughts on Metadata from Tim Berners-Lee
Open Forum on Metadata Registries: Santa Fe, January 17-21, 2000
Metadata Activity Statement from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
- The State of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, April 1999 describes the situation just before the 7th Dublin Core workshop.
- The 7th Dublin Core Metadata Workshop, October 25-27, 1999

What is Metadata?

Metadata is "information about information." Metadata comes in many forms, and can be thought of as a record of the characteristics of some form of information that can be used to organize, label, index, and utilize the content of the information. With the information explosion, metadata is becoming increasingly important in order to track and share information worldwide. Examples of metadata include a library card catalog (which indexes the library contents), a drivers license (metadata about you), and some of the markup codes that you can see on this webpage if you use the "view source" command on your browser. For a more technical description, we will cite researcher Linda Hill from the glossary of the Alexandria Digital Library:

Metadata describes the attributes of an information bearing object (IBO) -- document, data set, database, image, artifact, collection, etc.; metadata acts as a surrogate representation of the IBO. A metadata record can include representations of the content, context, structure, quality, provenance, condition, and other characteristics of an IBO for the purposes of representing the IBO to a potential user -- for discovery, evaluation for fitness for use, access, transfer, and citation. See also, Meta-information. Examples of metadata format are

the MARC format used by the library community

Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata developed by the Federal Geographic Data Committee

Directory Interchange Format (DIF) used by NASA's Global Change Master Directory

Government Information Locator Service (GILS), and

Dublin Core set of attributes for electronic resources developed with the lead of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).

Meta-information is a more general concept than "metadata", which it includes. Coined by T.R. Smith (International Journal on Digital Libraries, 2:1, pp. 105-7), "meta-information" can be viewed as "the outputs of a set of [digital library] services that support access to, and use of, the information in the collections..." [LH]