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Abstract

Understanding the ecology, condition, and changes of coastal areas requires data from many sources. Broad-scale and long-term ecological questions, such as global climate change, biodiversity, and cumulative impacts of human activities, must be addressed with databases that integrate data from several different research and monitoring programs. Various barriers, including widely differing data formats, codes, directories, systems, and metadata used by individual programs, make such integration troublesome. Coastal data partnerships, by helping overcome technical, social, and organizational barriers, can lead to a better understanding of environmental issues, and may enable better management decisions. Characteristics of successful data partnerships include a common need for shared data, strong collaborative leadership, committed partners willing to invest in the partnership, and clear agreements on data standards and data policy. Emerging data and metadata standards that become widely accepted are crucial. New information technology is making it easier to exchange and integrate data. Data partnerships allow us to create broader databases than would be possible for any one organization to create by itself.

A semantically integrated, user-friendly data model for species observation data

“…From the data providers' point of view, providing only basic metadata (enough for data discovery but not for interpretation) is clearly the easiest solution, and as such this is a common approach (Hale et al, 2003;Vanderbilt et al, 2008 (Jones et al, 2001). Semantic annotation is similar to the creation of full metadata, except that the descriptions consist of references to formal definitions (Bowers et al, 2010).…”