o 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.