Blogs

For those of you seeing this on the front page of MMI: I'm using this post to call attention to MMI blogs. If you're a member you can blog about metadata things on MMI. Ask us if you need help!

This Periodic Table of Visualization Methods is either not at all about metadata, or all about it. It sure is all about interoperability! The table has a remarkable amount of depth, even after you have discovered that mousing over an entry brings up an example of the corresponding visualization.

Ever wonder where we're headed, with all this new technology, and ever-more-complex development?  Check out "From linking to thinking: How we'll live when information surrounds us"

MBARI has done something I consider impressive in the scientific data management realm, and I want to toot their horn a little, so a blog entry seemed good for that. (Disclosure: I was hired in part to start up the project discussed below, and have gotten to claim part of its success despite contributing relatively little to it technically over the years.)

On April 23 to 24, 2009, a West Coast Coastal Atlas Workshop was hosted by the Washington State Department of Ecology and the NOAA Coastal Services Center at the NOAA Western Regional Center in Seattle, Washington, USA. The workshop brought together, for the very first time, over 30 participants from Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California to discuss coastal atlas interoperability issues.

OK, it's time to put the data/metadataData about data. Metadata provides a context for research findings, ideally in a machine-readable format. It enables discovery of data via an electronic interface, and correct use and attribution of findings. Related Guide question to bed, once and for all.  You know the one:

Do we call that data, or metadata?

I was really pleased to discover that the newsletter "International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW) referenced SCOOP in the lead article. But running one model in a distributed environment is only one step of a tall ladder. We don't have a world repository of grids and algorithms that we could assemble painlessly. For example, we should be able to ask for a numerical model that produces synthetic winds, storm surge or currents.