MMI – Marine Metadata Interoperability

MMI – Marine Metadata Interoperability is developing web applications and stand-alone tools to enable sophisticated interactions across marine data systems.

Description

MMI creates tools to make the data management process more efficient. Using MMI tools, data technologists can increase the interoperability of the scientific data they manage, providing additional benefits to scientific resource providers and users.1

MMI describes three classes of technical metadata standards – transport protocols, content standards, and vocabularies – and provides pointers to key tools that are used to work with metadata. MMI collects and develops guides on data management approaches.2

Tools developed at MMI for metadata:3

• Vocabulary Integration Environment (VINE) - a tool to map vocabularies.
• Vocabularies to OWL (voc2owl) Tool - a tool to perform fast conversion from vocabularies found in plain ASCII format to the Web Ontology Language (OWL).

MMI is funded in part by the National Science Foundation with support and contributions from the marine community.

Function

• Provider interaction
• Data preparation
• Metadata
• Creation
• Data discovery
• User interface
• institutional use
• Raw data

Why use this tool?

To encourage the discovery and re-use of scientific data.

If a data set is well documented and it is available to other researchers, the data is more likely to be used. Both research efforts will be complemented, opportunities for collaboration will increase, and the scope of research will broaden.4

Who will use this tool?

• Data creation
• Experts - taxonomy
• Data capture
• Curators – specimens, identification
• Data providers
• Institutions
• Private collections
• Casual users
• ALA infrastructure
• Special skills are required

How will the tool be used?

• Tool dependent

Where in the data chain could this tool be used?

• Data source
• ALA central

When could this tool be used?

• Before data is made available to ALA
• While data is stored with ALA

Availability

• MMI: http://marinemetadata.org/
• Metadata tools for creation, managing and access: http://marinemetadata.org/fordevelopers/tools
• MMI guides: http://marinemetadata.org/guides

Comments

MMI appear to be a recent arrival with a strong emphasis on promoting the exchange and use of marine data. Although there is not a lot of depth here now, this could be an important group to watch as tools and standards are created, and expectations develop into products.