1. ALA Metadata - Goals and Issues Donald Hobern, Director, Atlas of Living Australia 29 August 2008

2. Metadata Goals Government funding for repository development (6 developers) Catalogue biodiversity information resources Databases (specimen/observation, taxonomy, sequences, other) Images, literature, web pages Australian Phenomics Network data (mouse) Australian Plant Phenomics Network data (Arabidopsis, etc.) Enhance metadata via user annotations and ontologies Taxon concepts, gazetteer terms, mouse ontology, etc. Automated tagging from harvested data and text mining User annotations for additional tags Faceted interfaces to browse and search metadata by hierarchy Exchange metadata with other repositories (OAI-PMH) Contribute to wider national e-research framework (ANDS)

3. Metadata Issues Selection of appropriate standard for core metadata (EML?) Granularity of resources described by metadata Whole databases vs. individual records/images/documents Should handle nested resources (metadata scoped at different levels) Best practices for the use of OAI-PMH Sets Selection of appropriate categories to act as Sets Global coordination of metadata documents Identifiers for resources (LSIDs or other GUIDs) Recognition of original version of supplied metadata Tracking reuse and aggregation of metadata Avoidance of false duplication and noisy feedback Handling of metadata for cross-domain resources Ownership and annotation of metadata E.g. resource of use in biodiversity and climate research