Metadata Findings and Recommendations for the Inventory and Monitoring Division of the National Park Service

Sanders, Geoffrey

The Long-term Data Management Task Force (LTDM TF) was established in 2016 to engage the program in developing a vision and plan for how the Inventory and Monitoring Division (IMD) would manage data and information far into the future. During the process of developing their recommendation, the LTMD TF evaluated numerous criteria and requirements and developed assumptions and activities for each of the alternatives. Some of these assumptions and activities related specifically to metadata, including the importance of metadata formatting and content requirements. Addressing metadata requirements was one of the recommended “first steps” in implementing the Remodeled Data Store. The Long-term Data Management Governance Board (LTDM GB) was formed in order to start implementing and developing the recommendations of the LTDM TF. The Governance Board assigned tasks to working groups to accomplish this. The Metadata Working Group was the first group formed under the LTDM GB with the goal of researching and recommending an appropriate metadata standard or standards that will be adopted and implemented by IMD. The Remodeled Data Store will be designed to incorporate these recommendations. The group was composed of an interdisciplinary group of individuals from across the NPS. Group members collaborated to review existing standards, identify content requirements, research implementation approaches, and develop recommendations for the LTDM GB. The working group reviewed existing metadata standards including the ISO Suite of standards, Ecological Metadata Language (EML) and Darwin Core. The group also consulted with outside agencies to gain perspective and input as well working with subject matter experts to help identify the most appropriate recommendations to make to the LTDM GB. In the end the Metadata Working Group made the following recommendations: 1. Adopt the ISO Suite of Standards as the official IMD metadata standard. This recommendation is based on input from subject matter experts and trends from other government agencies. 2. The NPS Data Store should manage metadata information in a flexible and standard-agnostic manner. Even though the working group recommends adopting the ISO suite of standards as the official standard for IMD, the group recognizes the value of sharing metadata in various formats, and recommends the ability to consume and produce metadata in formats (at least EML and the ISO suite) that support a variety of user communities. 3. Adopt the more consistent use of standard vocabularies for metadata generation in order to improve management and discoverability of data sets.

Metadata Findings and Recommendations for the Inventory and Monitoring Division of the National Park Service

Series

Collections