Documentation and Guidelines

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.

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 version 1.0 (July 2012).

• Observational OA Metadata Content Standard (Excell format)
• Observational OA Metadata Content Standard (PDF format)

If you use the above standard, please cite it as Ocean Acidification Data Stewardship System (OADS) Team. 2012. Metadata content standard for in-situ observational ocean acidification data. Version 1.0. 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".

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

Web page last updated September 5, 2012 9:03 AM