Metadata with MMI Opening the Door to Collaboration John Graybeal, Luis Bermudez, Philip Bogden, Steven Miller, Stephanie Watson

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 1 About This Talk MMI (A Little Bit of Context) About Technical Collaborations Building Trust and Community How Metadata Can Help How MMI Will Help

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 2 * Initial (1-year) funding from NSF Grant ATM MMI: A Little Bit of Context John Graybeal Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Head of Marine Metadata Interoperability Project Since 2004*, an international collaboration to address metadata issues Goal is to help everyone solve their metadata problems Web site has resources, contributors, activities, conference lists, project spaces… Visit the site at

The Paper

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 4 About Software Collaborations Worst case: “Takeover” or “Forced Merge” Goals poorly aligned Few shared technical perceptions Small steps prove impossible Must build trust personally more than technically End of project (“big bang”) before visible result Ambiguous and limited technical benefit

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 5 Building Trust and Community Description of ideal collaboration Shared goals and technical perspectives Trust grows incrementally, as does the product Clear benefits, few risks; often surprises are good In this environment, collaboration thrives Success is likely, if good faith prevails Success feeds upon itself, creates more success Staff become eager to do more difficult projects

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 6 An agreed vocabulary is the start of a good collaboration. Metadata’s Place: The Beginning A good collaboration (or any team effort) is a very sophisticated communication Knowledge and ideas flow easily Problems quickly identified and pinpointed Participants interact as cohesive unit Language is where sophisticated communication starts Vocabulary is where language starts

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 7 Vocabularies as Team Builders Why focus on vocabulary development to build major science collaborations? The ideal collaborative traits are all found in vocabulary development Shared goals and technical perspectives Trust grows incrementally, as does work Clear benefits, few risks Positive surprises are likely Result: Successful outcomes, teams ready to work on more challenging problems

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 8 Supporting Evidence / Summary Several collaborations are developing along these lines; others are proposed MMI itself Environmental Observatories in United States And others I can’t talk about… Take-home message: For major projects that want to create a successful collaboration, start with vocabulary development.

The Project

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 10 How MMI Will Help Provide Resources and Community Create Tools and Best Practices Develop Interoperable Vocabularies And teach others how to develop them Provide Services via Web And demonstrate value finding science data

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 11 Provide Resources and Community MMI Web Site: >500 references and guides Pointers to Vocabularies, Standards, and Tools Recommendations about metadata issues Mail lists for expert help with any questions Conferences, workshops, proposal opportunities Membership has its privileges 130 members have work space, better access Custom work areas for metadata-related projects Opportunities to contribute to international project

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Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 13 Create Tools and Best Practices Implementing tools to work with metadata Easily map terms in different vocabularies Display similar terms from other vocabularies Training scientists and developers Workshops focus on science domains Demonstrations use modern interfaces Training materials posted for everyone Identifying best practices by other projects

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Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 16 Develop Interoperable Vocabularies (And teach others how to develop them!) To deal with so many science vocabularies We have an interoperable architecture But we need to develop content: vocabulary maps Vocabulary mapping workshop(s) Domain experts map the terms for their domain MMI provides tools, technologists to make it easy First workshop: Boulder, Colorado (Aug 9-11) 4-6 domains; 6-8 in each group See for detailshttp://marinemetadata.org/workshop All results will be posted on web site

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 17 Provide Services via Web (And demonstrate their use with science data.) Information stored as OWL representation Ontological Language for the Web; relations in XML Web services “publish” vocabularies/maps Applications use the web services Look up terms and relationships Find data sets which use those terms and relations Get data from those data sets

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 18 getAll getBroader getEquivalent getListOfProperties getListofResources getListOfValues getNamespaces getNarrower getOwlModelMetadata getProperties getRelatedResources getRepositories getTriples getValues

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 19 MMI Demo End-to-end use of metadata to discover and use science data sets Uses web services to map requests, find data Many (and growing) participants To participate or just check it out, see

Marine Metadata Interoperability Project / 20 Take-Home Messages The Marine Metadata Interoperability Project exists to help address scientific metadata challenges. You can help guide, and grow, this international community-based effort. Please visit us, contact us, or become a member and contributor at To ask for help, (Part 1) Vocabulary Development is Good.