OADS Ocean Acidification Metadata Templates

Ocean acidification metadata for in situ observational data

The NOAA National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) has been funded by the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program (OAP) to serve as its data management focal point through an Ocean Acidification Data Stewardship (OADS) project. The overarching goal of the OADS project is to serve the ocean acidification (OA) community by providing dedicated and unrestricted online data discovery, access to NODC-hosted and distributed authoritative data sources, long-term archival, coordinated data flow, and scientific stewardship for a diverse range of OA and other chemical, physical, and biological oceanographic data [OADS data submission guidelines].

Observational OA Metadata Content Standard

One of the primary goals of the Ocean Acidification Data Stewardship (OADS) project is to provide the OA community with a portal for easy discovery and access of ocean acidification data. To achieve that goal, we are developing metadata standards, 1) to provide guidance for submission of OA data, and 2) to archive and to simplify discovery of OA data, and 3) to properly configure the search engine for the archived OA data. The developed metadata standard could also serve as the basis for a community-wide shared standard for discovery of research quality ocean carbon and OA data.

Development of metadata standard usually involve two steps: 1) content standard development, to choose the metadata terms that we want to be included in the standard; and 2) format standard development, to place the selected metadata terms (from the content standard development) into their appropriate XML fields (e.g., FGDC, ISO, etc). We are currently in the first step, i.e., developing the metadata content standard for in-situ observational OA data.

The first round of community review for the metadata content standards of in-situ observational OA data was sent out on June 6, 2012. We thank those of you who have submitted their comments. We have incorporated the submitted comments to the observational OA metadata content standard. Below are links to the metadata standard for observational OA data.

Ideally, you should send your metadata to NODC using our metadata submission text template] [see Example for the text template] [See Instructions about the metadata terms in the text template]

Alternatively, if you have experience using xml files, you could send your metadat using our [XML (ISO 19115-2) template]

An inter-agency ocean acidification parameter vocabulary group has been formed with the goal to create an ocean acidification parameter list to facilitate OA data sharing. The approved ocean acidification parameters will be published in the Interagency Ocean Acidification Parameter list which resides in Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) web site.

If you use the above standard, please cite it as Ocean Acidification Data Stewardship System (OADS) Team 2013. Metadata content standard for in-situ observational ocean acidification data. Version 1.2. National Oceanographic Data Center. If you have any questions please feel free to contact us at NODC.Ocean.Acidification@noaa.gov, with the subject line "OA Metadata Comment".

Need Help?

For questions please contact NODC.Ocean.Acidification@noaa.gov

Web page last updated April 11, 2013 4:00 PM