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LTER Site Byte
LTER Site: Virginia Coast Reserve
Contributor: John Porter (Jul 12, 2005)
Site Byte:
It has been another busy year at the VCR/LTER, with a substantial revamping of the site web page (http://www.vcrlter.virginia.edu) and development of a program that automatically generates EML metadata from our existing metadatabase. We have also been involved with several outreach and service functions, including web support for the Statistical Ecology (http://www.esa.org/stat-ecol) and Long-Term Studies (http://www.esa.org/longterm) Sections of the Ecological Society of America and the Mid-Atlantic Region Ecological Observatory (http://mareo.org) and work on databases with the Taiwan Ecological Research Network (TERN). Additionally, we have been expanding our wireless networking capabilities to reach new field instrumentation.
We have been making extensive use of the PostNuke Content Mangement System (CMS) for developing special-purpose web pages with generally good results. As an open-source product aimed at "community" web sites, PostNuke provides many useful functions, but is not without limitations, the most notable of which is the inability to make menu bars page-specific. However, on balance it has worked surprisingly well.
Ecological Metadata Language (EML) production is now automated with a PERL program "make_eml.pl" that queries metadata from a relational database system using the perl DBI functions (allowing movement to another brand of database at a later time). Although we are able to generate more-or-less full EML metadata, there are areas where we need to alter our underlying system to accomodate EML needs. These include adding types to keywords (currently everything is listed as "thematic"), making measurement units more consistent, and improving information on taxonomic coverage. Aside from its length (due to the number of EML elements), the program was relatively easy to write - consisting of repeated "query -> create tag" sections. The biggest problem has been dealing with free text, where users make inconsistent use of paragraph markers in the text, thus potentially unbalancing XML tags and causing validation problems.
During the spring of 2005 we hosted Meei-ru Jeng of the Taiwan Forestry Reseach Institute for three months. During that time she worked on learning PERL, PHP, Mapserver, PostNuke and how to make these programs interact with MySQL databases. To hone her PERL skills and to help us reconcile our literature and personnel databases, she developed a program that creates an EndNote Import file wherein names and intiials of VCR researchers have full names substituted. These interactions continued this summer with visits by John Porter to Taiwan and China. Currently plans are being made for additional extended visits by Taiwanese information managers to US LTER sites.
Following up on successful wireless networking workshops at the LTER All-Sci meeting in 2003 and at the Ecological Society of America meeting in 2004, we wrote a paper for BioScience that was the cover story in the July 2005 issue. This is acompanied by yet-another-postnuke-web-site: http://wireless.vcrlter.virginia.edu. We hope that LTER information managers will be active contributors to that "community" web site as we gain additional experience with wireless networking.
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