Esperanto, Klingon, or Other: Metadata Implications for Global Marine Observations

摘要

For two years, the Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project has focused on improving marine data systems interoperability. Through community organizing and technical development, MMI has broadened awareness of the problems, increased community participation in its solutions, and advanced efforts toward interoperable data systems design. These universal themes match MMI's vision and mission, and demand an open cultural and technical approach. In this presentation we pursue the following questions: (1)How do we ensure the technical needs and perspectives of the international marine data management community are well met? (2)What cultural challenges must we overcome to engage the widest possible membership and participation? (3)How can we contribute to a truly common observing infrastructure, and not just theoretical ideas? Good practices in data management, metadata, and engineering all represent international ambitions. Although funding sources for the Marine Metadata Interoperability project have been exclusively American, the project has always had international participation and flavor. Our original Steering Committee included international membership (Roy Lowry, of the British Oceanographic Data Centre), and several of our technical contributors are not from the United States. In presentations and meetings in 2005 in Brest, France, and Sardinia, Italy, the Principal Investigator found eager listeners and much agreement on goals and methods. That said, the project is not yet a consistent leader in the realm of international community participation. As a key element of many architectural and metadata development processes in the U.S., it is important that MMI make the necessary international connections to ensure maximum interoperability across all data systems. What are these connections, how will we make them, and how will the results lead to a better global observing system for the world's oceans? Our efforts will go forward on three fronts. Technical work must be consistent with international activities, cognizant of those activities, and adoptable by them. Data management takes many forms, depending on resources and needs, and MMI must address all the different levels of sophistication and semantic interaction. One obvious consideration is linguistic - despite the mantra that science is performed in English, local languages will always be a staple in scientific endeavors. So MMI technical solutions must be language-friendly. And to the degree data systems are developed differently in different environments, MMI must be attentive to those differences. Many more cultural issues come to the fore, when considering MMI's public presence itself. The plone underpinnings of the MMI web site (http://marinemetadata.org) are multi-lingual, but the page content is not Membership on MMI committees, including the Steering Committee, must be more geographically distributed, And it must be clear to the widest possible audience that MMI is there to serve their data management needs. Just meeting all these goals would not guarantee international relevance and achievement. Understanding this, we must inject our understanding, resources, and services into the wider ocean observing realm. This will require more international presence, knowledge dissemination, and technical cognizance by MMI members. This can only take place if more international participants join our efforts, seeing in MMI the best opportunity to understand and pursue great data management practices. We must pursue collaborations with individuals and communities toward this end. We expect to achieve these goals, and in this presentation will describe our recent efforts to do so. We will also connect the technical activities under development at MMI, and potential international applications of those efforts. Finally, we will outline our plans for contributing as directly as possible to effective global ocean observing interoperability.