MMI: Increasing Community Collaboration
Abstract
Building community requires a collaborative environment and guidance to help move members towards a common goal. An effective environment for community collaboration is a workspace that fosters participation and cooperation; effective guidance furthers common understanding and promotes best practices. The Marine Metadata Interoperability (MMI) project has developed a community web site to provide a collaborative environment for scientists, technologists, and data managers from around the world to learn about metadata and exchange ideas. Workshops, demonstration projects, and presentations also provide community-building opportunities for MMI. MMI has developed comprehensive online guides to help users understand and work with metadata standards, ontologies, and other controlled vocabularies. Documents such as "The Importance of Metadata Standards", "Usage vs. Discovery Vocabularies" and "Developing Controlled Vocabularies" guide scientists and data managers through a variety of metadata-related concepts. Members from eight organizations involved in marine science and informatics collaborated on this effort. The MMI web site has moved from Plone to Drupal, two content management systems which provide different opportunities for community-based work. Drupal's "organic groups" feature will be used to provide workspace for future teams tasked with content development, outreach, and other MMI mission-critical work. The new site is designed to enable members to easily create working areas, to build communities dedicated to developing consensus on metadata and other interoperability issues. Controlled-vocabulary-driven menus, integrated mailing-lists, member-based content creation and review tools are facets of the new web site architecture. This move provided the challenge of developing a hierarchical vocabulary to describe the resources presented on the site; consistent and logical tagging of web pages is the basis of Drupal site navigation. The new MMI web site presents enhanced opportunities for electronic discussions, focused collaborative work, and even greater community participation. The MMI project is beginning a new initiative to comprehensively catalog and document tools for marine metadata. The new MMI community-based web site will be used to support this work and to support the work of other ad-hoc teams in the future. We are seeking broad input from the community on this effort.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2007
- Bibcode:
- 2007AGUFMIN53A0951G
- Keywords:
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- 4260 Ocean data assimilation and reanalysis (3225);
- 4299 General or miscellaneous;
- 9810 New fields (not classifiable under other headings)