Speaker: Ted Habermann, NOAA/NESDIS/NGDC
Title: ISO Metadata Standards and Interoperable Understanding

Documentation provides the context that adds understanding and knowledge to data. The ISO Standards for documenting data (19115, 19115-2), and services (19119) extend the range of standard documentation considerably beyond previously available approaches. They include increased utilization of technologies like UML, XML and linking and content areas like data quality and processing history. These extensions can build an emerging foundation of data interoperability into an infrastructure for interoperable understanding. This process will involve active collaboration between many environmental data providers and archives all over the world that are currently in the process of adopting and understanding how to effectively use the ISO Standards.

This seminar will describe ISO capabilities in the context of parallels between metadata tools and data interoperability approaches developed and used in the ocean, weather, and climate communities. I will demonstrate how directories shared over the web, transport standards, and community conventions build the foundation for documentation access and data understanding. I will also demonstrate crosswalks and connections between ISO, THREDDS, and NetCDF documentation and some ideas and approaches to improving documentation across the entire spectrum of environmental data and understanding.

Bio:
Dr. Ted Habermann works at NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) in Boulder Colorado. He has recently been working on a number of projects that integrate geospatial databases, international documentation standards and internet mapping. His group at NGDC manages the NOAA Metadata Manager and Repository (NMMR) that includes metadata for several thousand datasets produced and stewarded by NESDIS and the NOAA Data Centers. These records are provided in multiple standards (FGDC, DIF, NcML, THREDDS, and ISO) and views (FAQ, Text, HTML). His group is also active in the creation and sharing of ISO metadata for the NOAA Office of Climate Observations, the NOAA Observing System Architecture (NOSA), the GOES-R Project, the Group for High-Resolution Sea Surface Temperature (GHRSST) and the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). This work has included translating several thousand metadata records from FGDC to ISO using several approaches, development and sharing of ISO best practices, and participation in developing revisions to the ISO Standards.