[eml-dev] EML standard registration with the EPA's Environmental Data registry

[Matt Jones]

Inigo,

I've looked the spreadsheet over -- it mainly looks fine although there
are lots of picky details to haggle over.  I'm not sure you've got the
right idea for some of the columns in the Metadata sheet -- for example,
it seems that the Conceptual Domain Name and Definition fields are a way
to link fields together conceptually from different metadata standards,
so we should be mapping to other Conceptual Domains that already exist
in the EDR rather than creating a new unique Conceptual Domain for each
EML field (surely the BDP and other standards already have concepts for
surName and City).  Or we should leave it blank as it is optional.  In
addition, I don't understand how this is going to be used, so it is hard
to figure out how important the different fields are.  For example,
you've used 'Data Element Name' and 'Column Name' differently than the
BDP sheet did, and I'm not sure why.  The BDP sheet uses the field
identifier from the BDP for the 'Column Name', but that seems wrong to
me bacuase the BDP short name is really what is used in most BDP
documents as a column name.  Also, the 'Source Name' field seems
relevant to the mapping to existing data structures within the EDR, but
I'm not really clear on how it works.  Finally, it seems the flattening
of the structure loses much of the information content that was present
in the EML hierarchy (ie, surName can not be interpreted outside of its
parent element such as creator or contact).  Its not clear how EDR deals
with this (and it is relevant in BDP too).

If you join #eml on IRC we might be able to work some of these details
out a bit more quickly than we can through an email exchange.

Thanks for doing this!
Matt

Inigo San Gil wrote:
> 
> EML community:
> 
> A while ago I received a request to register the EML standard with
> EPA's  Environmental Data registry (EDR). This job consist of filling
> out an Excel spreadsheet with all sort of details about EML. The
> 'hardest' part of this spreadsheet is the "Metadata" section, where one
> is supposed to describe all parts of the standard. After reading the
> directions, and contacting some people at the EPA, I copied the EDR's
> interpretation of the Biological Data Profile. That is, I looked how
> these guys did it, and decided to adopt their approach as a reasonable
> strategy to do this
> 
> After some perl scripting, I produced the attached excel document named
> EDR_EML.xls. For guidance (metadata), please look at the attached EDR
> BDP elements.xls, where examples and instructions are included.
> Basically, I used the EML schema to populate the appropriate columns.
> Note that there is not any hand-editing, and there is little QA/QC after
> the perl code parsed the schema correctly, I want to get an idea of
> whether you are OK with the approach.
> 
> Feel free to correct, improve, or suggest changes. It would be desirable
> to submit a week from now, so please send me or send to eml-dev your
> input before then.
> 
> Thanks!
> Inigo
> 
> 
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Matt Jones                                     jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439    Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
University of California Santa Barbara
Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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