Metadata standards—a key for data discovery and data interoperability: tapping the ARM Archive metadata database

Description

The ARM Archive users depend on the creation of structured metadata for search and discovery, sharing and interoperability, management, and reuse of data. Metadata also helps users answer questions about the data, helps publish the data for secondary access, and can facilitate provenance and attribution. Metadata following extended standards further improve the data search and discovery process and allow data providers to publish their metadata in distributed scientific discovery systems, which provides more visibility to the data products. Many different metadata schemes are being developed as standards for disciplines that span Earth and ecological sciences, libraries, education, archiving, e-commerce, and arts. Metadata standards applicable to ARM data are ISO 19115, Federal Geographic Data Committee’s (FGDC) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM), Earth Science Markup Language (EML), NASA’s Global Change Master Directory’s (GCMD) Directory Interchange Format (DIF), and Dublin Core. The ARM Archive contains a rich metadata database. Exporting these metadata values into standards-based metadata records allows the Archive to build better data discovery tools. For example, standards-based metadata can enable users to discover data using various advanced search capabilities such as fielded, temporal, and spatial search. Standardized metadata also allows users to filter the search results based on logical grouping. Creating standardized metadata records will allow the ARM to publish the metadata in various scientific data discovery tools such as Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), Earth System Grid (ESG), data.gov, science.gov, and Geospatial One Stop (GOS). The ARM Archive recently created metadata records in FGDC format. The poster will demonstrate some of the new data discovery concepts using these standardized metadata records. It will also demonstrate the discovery of ARM data using other distributed data search systems such as GEOSS and data.gov. Other advantages such as provenance and attribution will also be explored.