Biodiversity and Ecosystem Informatics: Event and Process Tagging for Information Integration for the International Gulf of Main Watershed

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EIA-0131912Beard-Tisdale, Mary-KateUniversity of MaineBDEI: Event and process tagging for information integration for the International Gulf of Maine WatershedProject SummaryThis incubation proposal addresses the issue of integrating large, diverse, and autonomouscollections of scientific data within a complex institutional setting. The goal is to convert theseautonomous collections into a shareable repository that supports synthesis of data through newmetadata structures based on events and processes. The institutional setting is the data and data-gathering activities of over 80 agencies, NGOS, and academic and research institutions operatingwithin the Gulf of Maine watershed. The metadata development will be coordinated by library andspatial information scientists working jointly with domain scientists. An essential task of thisincubation effort will be the development of a shared understanding of environmental processes andevents that becomes a shareable ontology.Libraries play a vital role in organizing intellectual access to creative works. Scientific data hastended to be outside this traditional purview and has thus lacked the benefits of cataloging andindexing that promote shared access. We are proposing a new metadata structure that exploitscommon units of analysis in environmental studies: events and processes. Associating scientific datasets with event and process tags, in addition to other metadata elements, can substantially improvethe ability to integrate and synthesize diverse scientific collections. The metadata initiative of thisproposal will lay the foundation for specifying events and processes through the collaboration ofdata collections content specialists and information management specialists.