LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: Santa Barbara Coastal

Contributor: Margaret O'Brien (Sep 12, 2005)

Site Byte:

This year as in previous, Santa Barbara Costal LTER's Information Management system collaborated with other local coastal and oceanographic programs with whom we also share collection and analysis methods and personel. Our data catalog is shared with PISCO (administered by Chris Jones and Jordan Morris) and we will be soon joined by the Moorea Coral Reef LTER site (whose Information Manager is yet to be hired). SBC's data needs are managed by Margaret O'Brien with reprentatives from its major research groups who provide data and metadata and receive introductory instruction to data storage methods (e.g., EML) as needed. Also during 2005, the LTER-PISCO IM office moved into a new building on the UCSB campus, putting us on the same floor as the NCEAS Ecoinformatics programmers. We are enjoying fruitful interactions with this group, also.

Data Catalog: During the past year, the contents of our Metacat data catalog was updated from version EML2.0beta6 to EML2.0.1. About 70% of core data is currently included and is at approximately level 4. For browsing, we have created canned queries using a thesaurus of research categories, and keyword and/or site queries are planned. The remaining core data will be added to the catalog by the end of the calendar year. In general, SBC has chosen the strategy of bringing "fewer datasets to a higher level". This is efficient because most of SBC's data goes (or will go) directly into metacat from collection/analysis, with multiple datasets making use of a common eml template with full attribute discriptions. Some of our current data packages will serve as templates for new packages. Currently, some data packages contain several data tables if these shared spatial, time or protocol coverage, however some of these will be separated to allow finer-grained searches. During the summer 2005, our metacat began replicating to the KNB network. Chris Jones has led an effort to redesign XSL stylesheets for displaying EML content in a modular form in HTML pages, using Cascading Style Sheets to control look and feel. This project is well underway, but still requires considerable work. Two implementations can be viewed at the data links below.

In addition to the data catalog, we have also been investigating the uses of EML for handling other information. We have recently inplemented a variant of EML in Metacat for our site's bibliography. We have found EML to be quite well suited to our needs, providing mechanisms for a separate listing of in-press pubs, fairly quick displays and filtering, document distribution, and possibly, a link to an associated dataset. This project is ongoing, and may result in some products that will be useful to the network as a whole.

Quite soon, we are anticipating upgrades in both our server hardware and Metacat software. In late August, we plan to migrate our data server and catalog to an IBM x336 with a 2.4tb raid array. SBC is already preparing for its 2006 renewal, and so a good deal of IM time has gone into assisting researchers with their synthesis projects. For the next several months, most of the IM projects will have data access, integration and synthesis as their promary goal.

Further information:
data catalogs with xsl/css style:
http://data.piscoweb.org
http://sbc.lternet.edu/data

bibliographic db (under construction):
http://sbc.lternet.edu/catalog/style/skins/sbclter/sbcPubsDisplay.jsp

Web design by Wade Sheldon, Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER