Automation of ecological data management using structured metadata (Hosted by NCEAS)

Data management is a key element in facilitating synthetic ecological research, and thus constitutes an important focus of efforts for NCEAS. Researchers at NCEAS must integrate large numbers of arbitrarily structured and poorly documented data sets. It is critically important that NCEAS investigators, in collaboration with the Center's technical staff, prepare and organize information about these data to facilitate appropriate use and dissemination of the synthesized databases. While some work has been completed towards the development of standards for ecological metadata, relatively little has been done on issues surrounding the technological implementation of a system that could make use of those content standards. We propose to use Standardized General Markup Language (SGML) to formalize a content standard for ecological metadata, and then to build a suite of automated data management tools written in Java that use this formalized standard. These software tools for documentation and quality control work must be easy to use for the typical ecologist, thereby allowing them to focus on ecological questions rather than database technologies.