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command line posting

Examples of great metadata?

Today, I am sitting in a metadata workshop at UNH run by Northeast Coastal and Ocean Data Partnership (formerly: Gulf of Maine Ocean Data Partnership) NeCODP... it's also their annual meeting. Back in January, I attended a Metavist metadata workshop put on at the Alaska Science Symposium by NBII's metadata folks.

I have been struggling for a long time with metadata. I have felt strongly that something is fundamentally wrong. I'm starting to feel that this is that we are missing examples that are held up to the community as best practices and examples of how this metadata is used. As Google has popularized, we need to dog food the metadata. And it has to be understandable by the 1st year graduate student, not just metadata experts!

So, what are example of best practices in ISO 19115 metadata (I consider FGDC metadata as dead and pointless for a global community). And it really sucks how closed the ISO standards are. So totally frustrating. Am I going to try to teach UML to new grad students? We need to be able to kickoff with metadata and get going in 15-30 minutes and UML is counter to this understanding in short time frames.

The keynote speaker is Ted Habermann who gave a fantastic talk. However, strongly disagree with Ted on a couple points. First is with the pay for standards model. We are not making light bulbs and the standards bodies are not paying us for our time writing these standards. Hiding software and data standards only degrades the ability of individuals to be empowered. Large companies like ESRI could care less one way or another about the costs, but it is up to us, the data producers and consumers to be empowered. It's getting way way too complicated! Ted's Metadata Standards page doesn't even cover a small fraction of the standards he talked about during his keynote. e.g. what is EML? He also mentioned UDDC - Unidata Data Discovery Conventions, NetCDF Markup Language (NcML), etc.

There has got to be something simpler, because with complexity comes increased error rates and all sorts of training problems. Can we use simpler strategies? e.g. Geodata Discovery and geo micro format

And to be different than the speaker, when it comes to researchers and especially graduate students, the do go to wikipedia to read multiple papes and you can make books out of groups of pages. Wikipedia:Books

Examples of good cruise reports and descriptive reports (DR)?

I am on the hunt for great cruise reports and hydrographic survey Descriptive Reports (DR). I'm asking a few people directly for their opinions, but here I'm asking anyone who is willing to share their take on examples of what makes a great report.

For example, Jim Gardner shared his CRUISE KM1009 May 17, to June 16, 2010.

MS photosynth

Just made a panorama with my iPhone!

C++ testing 2011

I started really digging in to C++ testing with a post listing lots of options. If you have comments on any of these systems and especially if you can link to people reviewing their experiences with the testing systems (preferably in the last couple years), it would be a huge help.

My new post: unittesting c++ in 2011 - part 1. My old post last year: Which c++ logging and unit test framework(s)?

Phil on Alaska TV

Deepwater Horizon Lessons learned

If you are in Anchorage, AK this evening, come by the Captain Cook Hotel and join us for Lessons Learned from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill from 5:45-8:00PM at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium. Here are some lessons learned in my oppinion to try to help get the discussion going:

• Ships of all sizes should have AIS and there must be a way to track which ships are a part of a response


• Have portable AIS systems ready to put on ships (suitcase version)


• Know the bathymetry and be willing to collect your own if necessary. Have charts, the Coast Pilot and local names


• Have a manual that you get to all of the team. People coming to the area don’t know the local names, physical layout, and available data / resources


• Start using mobile devices to collect data – position and information. Avoid handwritten and voice communication to prevent confusion


• Train with actual ships being virtually moved around


• Get necessary data integrated into AOOS, ERMA and other systems before you are in a crisis. Unlike Deepwater Horizon, initial response time is usually critical


• Train people to work with the data types before a crisis


• PDFs and paper are not good primary delivery devices


• Communication across all the teams makes or breaks the response


• We should have AIS from a couple response vessels forwarded through satellite to supplement normal stations

Some are being worked on now, some are not. What would you add?