tory change over time. The OAI-PMH service should itself be registered as a resource in the ALA metadata repository (along with any default metadata properties applying to all records). The ALA will then use this interface to harvest the underlying data records.
For more information on OAI-PMH, see:
In cases in which none of the above protocols is appropriate, it is possible simply to share a resource by publishing it in a web-browser-compatible format (word processor document, PDF, HTML, JPEG, MPEG, Flash, Java applet, etc.) and providing sufficient metadata to ensure that a user can understand the nature of the resource and how to use it.
In such cases, the ALA is able to direct users to the resource and may be able to add value by indexing the content of the resource (for text resources) but it will typically not be possible to use the information in more complex analyses.
The ALA is developing a metadata repository for capturing information about data resources of relevance to Australian biodiversity. This is a work-in-progress and the following guidelines will be extended and perhaps modified in coming months.
In general, metadata can solve several critical problems with managing data:
The goal of the ALA is to gather sufficient metadata from different sources to meet the following requirements:
Achieving this goal will depend on bringing together metadata gathered from different sources:
This section addresses only the first three of these sources, i.e. the metadata provided explicitly by the data provider.
Data providers should consider the range of expected users for their data and include appropriate metadata terms expected by those communities. For example, materials developed for use in education might consider the Metadata Guidelines provided by the Learning Federation and incorporate some of the suggested terms from the edna metadata standard. The ALA will seek to preserve and propagate such domain-specific metadata fields.
Dublin Core is a set of general-purpose metadata elements which can be used to describe any data resource. The ALA expects particularly to harvest Dublin Core metadata for resources exposed via OAI-PMH and for images and other multimedia shared through a tab-delimited/comma-separated file of metadata. Dublin Core properties may however also be used to provide additional metadata on a record-by-record basis for data records exposed through TAPIR or LSIDs.
See Images and other multimedia for specific recommendations on the use of Dublin Core properties for multimedia objects.
In general, the ALA recommends that the Dublin Core Subject property should contain the scientific name for the organism or taxon covered by a particular resource, or alternatively an LSID or other unique identifier for the relevant taxon in a recognised taxonomic resource (e.g. AFD/APC or Catalogue of Life).
EML is a metadata specification developed and promoted for use with ecological data. It includes a number of features which make it highly suitable as a standard metadata representation for the ALA. In particular (unlike Dublin Core), it includes elements explicitly intended to capture information on the taxonomic and geographic scope of a data set, and on any methods which went into the data capture.
EML can be represented as an XML document describing a data set. Typically the EML document therefore contains the metadata and an associated tab-delimited/comma-separated file contains the experimental data.
The ALA and GBIF are both exploring the use of EML as a preferred metadata representation. The ALA expects therefore to make specific recommendations in the near future. In the mean time, the ALA commits to handle metadata captured as EML documents.
Morpho is a free standalone tool for editing EML documents. GBIF is working on an EML editor integrated into its data portal.