LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: Sevilleta LTER

Contributor: Kristin Vanderbilt (Jul 29, 2005)

Site Byte:

The Sevilleta LTER Information Management group continues its conversion of our text-file based information management system into MySQL. More data entry and QA/QC tools were developed during the past year that capitalize on the relational database. A particular coup for the Sevilleta IM, Kristin Vanderbilt, was getting the SEV publications database moved into MySQL and a web interface created that allows PIs to enter their own publication data.

The Sevilleta IM team has embraced wikis as a mechanism for posting FAQs about systems administration, data entry instructions, protocols, and data processing instructions. The wikis have been integrated into our PostNuke-based web page.

We continue to translate our legacy semi-structured text metadata into EML. It’s a time-consuming process, because for some of the data we have used Morpho for the conversion. Inigo San Gil from LNO has been working with us recently to develop a script that will do the conversion for much of our data. The output of the script will include attribute metadata, so we will be well on our way to Level 3 compliance as described by the EML Best Practices document. By the end of the year, with the help of Inigo, we expect to have most of our metadata available as EML. We successfully harvested some EML documents into metacat on July 28, 2005.

Kristin continues to be involved in outreach projects. She teaches portions of ecoinformatics training classes for personnel from OBFS and for junior faculty and postdocs who participate in a training course sponsored by the Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge project (http://seek.ecoinformatics.org). She is also involved in a research project with Judy Cushing from Evergreen State College, wherein templates for ecological databases are being designed for a pilot project focused on integrating grassland LTER NPP data. She also participated in a panel at the SSDBM meeting in June 2005 entitled “NSF Long Term Ecological Research Sites: Praxis et Theoria—LTER Information Management and CS Research.” Kristin also presented a poster entitled “Ecoinformatics Training: Toward Data Sharing and Collaborative Research” at the Workshop for Enhancing Collaborative Research on the Environment in Sub-Saharan Africa in Arlington, VA in January 2005.

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