Metadata Activities in Biology

The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) has advanced the ability of biological sciences to standardize, share, integrate, and synthesize data by making the metadata program a core of its activities. A series of crosswalks for the main biological metadata specifications enable data providers and international clearinghouses to aggregate and disseminate tens of thousands of metadata records describing petabytes of data records and allow for interoperability. These efforts were accomplished by forming strategic partnerships with key research organizations in the biological and ecological sciences. This paper provides an overview of metadata initiatives undertaken by NBII and the Long Term Ecological Research Network. New efforts to provide better metadata creation and curation tools based on content management systems with semantic mediation for data discovery are presented.