LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: Palmer Station

Contributor: Karen Baker (Aug 27, 2005)

Site Byte:

PAL Information Management efforts focused on implementing a second-generation system designed over the last few years following research into and experience with site practices, federated network criteria, and metadata standards' requirements. Study of the infrastructuring concept along with last year's hardware implementations created a contemporary infrastructure within our local UCSD/SIO Integrative Oceanography Department so that the PAL data project could be migrated to a new storage system. Update and reorganization of the decade old file structure and its content is ongoing. The informatics team with designated information manager Karen Baker broadened to include Shaun Haber and Mason Kortz as web and database designers, Lynn Yarmey as dictionary and metadata analyst, and Jerry Wanetick as computational center director and systems administrator.

Amid a year of multiple transitions, the site highest priority data management task was development of a long-term, extensible metadata strategy, bridging from decade old text forms to a relational database approach. From this effort emerged the recognition of a need to develop unit and attribute dictionaries. In considering the site information system holistically, the design and implementation of a personnel directory represents the initial module an important element to an integrated approach. Along with these activities, a Palmer web site redesign includes a three tier template, stylesheets and update of dynamic elements such as the photo gallery, glossary, and sampling grid program under the new architecture.

Collaborative local activities included coordination with the colocated LTER California Current Ecosystem (CCE) site and California Cooperative Oceanographic
Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) programs along with the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS) program. The design and development of an Ocean Informatics Environment is ongoing, providing a comprehensive conceptual framework for all informatics activities. Making use of a design studio approach along with strategic design teams and working groups contributed to community efforts such as a joint data acquisition schema and promoted a shared understanding across multiple data types. Interaction with the Comparative Interoperability Project is providing opportunities to consider and articulate how IM work is carried out within different communities (Ribes et al, 2005; Baker et al, 2005; Millerand et al, 2005) and prompted development of two local reading groups. In additional, PAL and CCE contributed the notion of 'social informatics' to the first meeting of LTER social scientists in August of this year.

LTER Network activities included participation with the Dictionary Process Unit Repository design team that created a prototype web application in time for the annual Information Management meeting. Further, a Community Process Working Group provided a mechanism for exploring lessons learned in the design, development, implementation, and enactment of community standards.

Web design by Wade Sheldon, Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER