The south Florida ecosystem, encompassing Everglades National Park, urban areas on the coast, intensely developed agricultural areas, rangelands, and wetlands, has been altered greatly over the last 100 years. In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) began a research program in support of the restoration of the Everglades and south Florida ecosystem. Early in the program, the need for information to document the projects and later the resulting datasets was recognized. Metadata allow for the documentation and discovery of data. They also provide lasting information about the data in the event the data producer is no longer available. Use of standardized terminology facilitates searches for data by all users.

In 1994, Executive Order 12906 was issued, which mandated that digital data produced by a Federal agency be documented with metadata specified by the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata. Members of the South Florida Information Access (SOFIA) metadata team conducted a survey of the project chiefs on the usefulness of metadata and their willingness to provide FGDC-compliant metadata for their projects and datasets. The overwhelming majority of the respondents agreed that metadata were very important, but funds and personnel were needed to create the metadata. Furthermore, most of them felt that the FGDC standard was confusing and cumbersome to use. The survey results led to the decision to create a metadata team for generating the required metadata. This would result in more consistent metadata, and the scientists would not have to become familiar with the FGDC standard to document only one or two projects or datasets a year.

The initial metadata records were created by interviewing the project chiefs and using their project proposals to fill in the elements in the FGDC standard. The project chiefs then reviewed the resulting records and the team made the indicated changes or corrections. The records were then posted on the SOFIA web site and indexed for searching on the FGDC National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) node as the south Florida Ecosystem database.

Several methods have been used to create the FGDC metadata records. Initially, a template was created using a word processing program. The required FGDC elements were populated, and the file was output in ASCII text format. For the last several years, the commercial software program Spatial Metadata Management System (SMMS) has been used. SMMS is currently a product of the Intergraph Corporation. This program is not perfect but is a great improvement over the word processing template. Output from this program is also in ASCII text for input to the USGS program "mp," which is used to parse the metadata records for conformance with the correct parent-child relationships for FGDC metadata. This program also allows output of the records in various formats, such as the outline or standard FGDC format, a question and answer format that uses "plain English" statements for the metadata information, SGML to index the records for the FGDC NSDI node, ASCII text, XML, and several other formats not used on SOFIA. Other options for creating metadata include USGS in-house software XTME for UNIX-based systems and TKME for Windows-based systems. Metadata created from a word processing template must be run through preparser software "cns," also from the USGS. This program formats ASCII text files into the outline format for input to mp.

Current work on the metadata involves updating the project records and creating records for all the datasets available on the Data Exchange pages on SOFIA. Information to update the metadata is being gleaned from project annual summaries, proposals, work plans, and published reports, such as USGS Open-File Reports, Water Resources Investigations Reports, fact sheets, conference abstracts, and journal papers. The updated records are sent to the project chiefs for review. Recently, the SOFIA program manager decided to document types of data rather than individual datasets. This necessitates combining records already on SOFIA into one record for each type of data collected by a project chief. It also will reduce the number of metadata records to be maintained. The plan is to have all fiscal year (FY) 2003 projects documented with FGDC-compliant metadata by the GEER conference in April 2003. By the end of the fiscal year, the data sets for FY03 will also have current FGDC metadata records. Metadata for projects and datasets that have been completed also will be updated but at a lower priority. Another lower priority goal is to document relevant historical datasets with metadata to enhance the ability to do time-series studies for the Everglades area. Links will be provided to other organizations' metadata applicable to the Everglades restoration effort.

Undocumented data are of little use other than to the collector. Information about the data must be available to ensure its future use. The FGDC metadata standard provides standardized element names and information. This allows potential users to search for and evaluate the data for their use. It also preserves the usefulness of the data if the original data collector leaves the organization. Data generated by the USGS as part of the research into the Everglades restoration effort need to be available to other researchers in the future and will enhance data collection efficiency. Documenting projects and datasets with proper metadata can help prevent duplication in data collection.

Information on XTME, TKME, cns, and mp can be found at http://geology.usgs.gov/tools/metadata/.

An explanation of Metadata in plain language can be found at http://geology.usgs.gov/tools/metadata/tools/doc/ctc/.

The FGDC metadata standard is available at http://www.fgdc.gov/metadata/contstan.html
(see http://www.fgdc.gov/metadata/geospatial-metadata-standards).

Information on SMMS is available at http://www.intergraph.com/gis/smms/.

The metadata for the USGS Place-Based Studies research in south Florida are on the SOFIA Web site at http://sofia.usgs.gov/.

Any use of trade, product, or firm names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.

Contact: Jo Anne, Stapleton, U.S. Geological Survey, 12201 Sunrise Valley Drive, MS 521, Reston, VA 20192, Phone: 703-648-4592, Fax: 703-648-4614, email: jastapleton@usgs.gov, Information Systems

(This abstract was taken from the Greater Everglades Ecosystem Restoration (GEER) Open File Report 03-54)

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