Ecological research

A body of standards, including a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries.

Sponsored by Biodiversity Information Standards (TWDG), the current standard was last modified in October 2009.

An early metadata initiative from the Earth sciences community, intended for the description of scientific data sets. It includes elements focusing on instruments that capture data, temporal and spatial characteristics of the data, and projects with which the dataset is associated. It is defined as a W3C XML Schema.

Sponsored by the Global Change Master Directory, the DIF Writer's Guide Version 6 is from November 2010.

The European Directory of Marine Environmental Datasets metadata scheme, which is a profile of ISO 19115.

Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata specification particularly developed for the ecology discipline. It is based on prior work done by the Ecological Society of America and associated efforts (Michener et al., 1997, Ecological Applications).

Established by a global network of countries and organizations, GBIF is a web portal promoting and facilitating the mobilization, access, discovery and use of biodiversity data. The portal uses a profile of EML; a How-to Guide and Reference Guide for using the profile are available.

The MIBBI Project was an international collaboration seeking to harmonize the efforts of the various bioscience communities developing Minimum Information (MI) reporting guidelines or checklists. Approximately 40 such checklists registered with the project.

The MIBBI Foundry was an attempt to identify common features of the various MI checklists and codify them into modules. The aim was to evolve the existing checklists towards formal intercompatibility, and to enable new checklists to be produced by selecting and extending the available modules.

The concept was realized initially through the joint efforts of the Proteomics Standards Initiative, the Genomic Standards Consortium and the MGED RSBI Working Groups.

While the MIBBI Foundry did not develop to the point where it could become a true, technical parent standard for the MI checklists, the MIBBI Project provided a useful grouping of standards that shared a common purpose, philosophy and inspiration.

MIxS is a superset of metadata elements that can be used to compile minimum information checklists for reporting sequencing data. It was developed by the Genomic Standards Consortium (GSC) as an overarching framework that could act as a single entry point for all their minimum information checklists (as reported in Nature Biotechnology).

MIxS includes the technology-specific checklists from the previous MIGS and MIMS standards (for genomes and metagenomes respectively), provides a way of introducing additional checklists such as MIMARKS (for marker sequences), and also allows annotation of sample data using environmental packages.

Some repositories have decided that current standards do not fit their metadata needs, and so have created their own requirements.

A metadata standard for describing environmental monitoring activities, programmes, networks and facilities published by the UK Environmental Observation Framework (UKEOF).