METS Data Working Group

In the first year of the METS RCN, we will establish a working group of marine scientists, data scientists, and data managers from the task team leadership of the community consensus-building workshop. The working group will meet virtually and in person, in conjunction with RCN activities and other national meetings, to identify use cases that will drive development of reference implementations of FAIR METS data framework components.

This effort will leverage BCO-DMO expertise and its ongoing efforts to develop common oceanographic data type models. Here BCO-DMO is employing semantic web technologies to help overcome data integration challenges associated with marine data types. Semantic technologies like ontologies define the schema, axioms and relationships between data. By using ontologies, the working group can openly share the knowledge of how data are related, but also how data could be formatted and shared. A data model for reporting time series parameters, encoded as an ontology, communicates to both humans and machines the expectations of both data submitted as times series, as well as how time series data can be interpreted by users. A data type ontology can express the meaning of these parameters, the expected units for each parameter, and any other useful knowledge required to properly share time series data across the user and submitter communities.

Many of the targeted NSF-supported METS projects currently work with BCO-DMO to share their data through the BCO-DMO system. However at present, these activities are unique to each project and vary in timing and effort across the METS community. Through this working group, the office will collaborate to identify required and optional time series parameters, along with their associated attributes, to create a community-wide data model for METS data sharing. This work will be incorporated into data model development already underway within BCO-DMO.