Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory Metadata Development in Support of the Oceans and Human Health Tidal Creeks Database at HML 1 David L. White, 1 Danna Dowdy, 2 Dwayne E. Porter 1 NOAA Hollings Marine Laboratory, Charleston, SC Arnold School of Public Heath, Environmental Health Sciences, University of South Carolina, SC SEACOOS Data Management Workshop, Chapel Hill, March 9-10, 2006

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory NOAA Hollings Marine Laboratory National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science NOAA's Oceans and Human Health Initiative Center Develop new methods and approaches to identify and characterize chemical and microbial threats to marine ecosystems and human health HML works in three core research areas including source tracking of marine pathogens, chemical contaminants, and applied marine genomics

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory

Overview of Data Management at HML Our goal is to facilitate the scientific process by providing the tools to identify and access relevant data sources that are of known quality and with a documented lineage – Dedicated staff to develop tools and provide guidance for data management and synthesis – Integrated and flexible data and information system linked to research cores – Web-based technologies to enable data/metadata documentation, archival, discovery, access and visualization

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory Tidal Creek Database (Storage)‏ Currently composed of data from multiple state and federal studies in SC dating back to 1995 – Tidal Creek Project (TCP) (SCDNR) ‏ – South Carolina Estuarine and Coastal Assessment Program (SCE-CAP) (SCDNR) ‏ – May River Project (USGS) ‏ – Land Use – Coastal Ecosystem Study (LU-CES) (NOAA) ‏ – Oceans and Human Health (OHH) (NOAA) ‏

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory Tidal Creek Database Current data holdings include data from five Federal and State research projects – Exposure: water quality, nutrients, pigments, pathogens, physical, and chemical analytes of sediments (27,278 records) ‏ – Response: Species abundances in tidal creek waters and sediments (69,394 records composed of 5,639 unique species) ‏ – Continuous Water Quality: DO, temp, salinity, pH, turbidity, depth, and Chl a (27,278 records) ‏

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory Metadata Metadata (Greek: meta- + Latin: data "information"), literally "data about data", is information that describes another set of data (

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory “Metadata Philosophy” Metadata and information documentation is an issue of scale – Projects – Datasets – Records Support the use of data – How was the data collected and analyzed? – What are the units? – Can I compare unique records from different projects?

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory “Metadata Philosophy” Integrate metadata and information into our database systems. – With a limited staff (2)…. keep it simple and manageable – Enhance web-based data dissemination systems

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory Information & Metadata Parameter Vocabulary - PostgreSQL – Documents OHH analytes (units, description, short-names, links to NIST Standard Reference Database) ‏ – Support understanding of data elements in an interdisciplinary research environment (semantic metadata) – Facilitate interoperability with other data providers Data Records - PostgreSQL – Collection and Analytical Methods documented for each result/record along with ancillary information

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory Metadata Standards Federal Geographic Data Committee Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (ISO 19115) ‏ – Document GIS data layers (shapefiles, geodatabases etc.… fairly automatic using ESRI ArcGIS) ‏ – Create a FGDC record for tidal creek database Minimum Information About Microarray Experiments (MIAME) ‏ – A community-based metadata standard to facilitate result interpretation and reproducing experiments

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory Metadata – Dublin Core Dublin Core metadata (ISO 15836) – Mandatory for all data set uploads to OHH databases (project level) ‏ – Provides for the succinct documentation of who, what, where and how The Dublin Core metadata element set is a standard for cross-domain information resource description. Here an information resource is defined to be "anything that has identity …….. There are no fundamental restrictions to the types of resources to which Dublin Core metadata can be assigned (

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory Information & Metadata Metadata Catalog – Content Management System (Plone) ‏ – Web-based form allows user to create a “Dublin Core” metadata record – Linked to PostgreSQL database for record storage and retrieval – Supports additional attachments such as FGDC in multiple formats text, HTML, PDF, MS Word and XML – Fully searchable – Other important documents such as detailed protocols

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory Dublin Core Use for Project Descriptions Title Contributor Coverage Description Relation Source Subject Date (Creation)‏ Addendums Sampling Project Additional Information Attachments

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory Summary Metadata and information documentation occurs at multiple levels within the database (project, dataset and record) ‏ Employ various methods and applications to create multiple levels of data and information documentation Goal: to integrate metadata and information together in our data dissemination applications

Center of Excellence for Oceans and Human Health at the Hollings Marine Laboratory

Current Efforts & Future Directions Focused on filling existing gaps in documentation and metadata Infrastructure and database schemas are set Application development and additional data migration Mapping between DC and FGDC…if needed… –