Stocks

Within research environments, good, usable data is paramount to scientific success. However extremely diverse data is often distributed across many institutions, collected in a variety of ways, and stored in dissimilar systems. Standards-based interoperability is the key to harnessing this variety into a strategic set of usable data As a community collaboration, the Marine Metadata Interoperability project (MMI) exists to promote the exchange, integration and use of marine data through enhanced data publishing, discovery, documentation and accessibility. To accomplish these goals, MMI has established a collaborative web environment (http://marinemetadata org), informative guides, workshops on current topics, vocabulary working group and OOSTethys (OGC Interoperability Project, http //www.oostethys.org/).

The image metadata project led by MMI and th Census of Marine Life on Seamounts is one example of how MMI is working with the oceanographic community to facilitate data interoperability. Photographs and other still images are used to document research in many ways, and the ability to find and share them is critical to their utility Because a good metadata specification doesn’t exist for environmental science images, MMI and CenSeam are developing one. A draft specification has been developed and we invite review and comment from the community: http://marinemetadata org/imagemetadata