Making Sense of Metadata Mess: Alignment & Risk Assessment for Diatom Data Use Case

Biologists study Diatoms, a fundamental algae, to assess the health of aquatic systems. Diatom specimens have traditionally been preserved on analog slides, where a single slide can contain thousands of these microscopic organisms. Digitization of these collections presents both metadata challenges and opportunities. This paper reports on metadata research aimed at providing access to a digital portion of the Academy of Natural Sciences' Diatom Herbarium, Drexel University. We report results of a 3-part study covering 1) a review of relevant metadata standards and a microscopy metadata framework shared by Hammer et al., 2) a baseline metadata alignment mapping current diatom metadata properties to standard metadata types, and 3) a metadata risk analysis associated with the course of standard data curation practices. This research is part of an effort involving the transfer of these digital slides to an new system, DataFed, to support global accessible. The final section of this paper includes a conclusion and discusses next steps.

Enhancing Semantic Interoperability Across Materials Science With HIVE4MAT

HIVE4MAT is a linked data interactive application for navigating ontologies of value to materials science. HIVE enables automatic indexing of textual resources with standardized terminology. This article presents the motivation underlying HIVE4MAT, explains the system architecture, reports on two evaluations, and discusses future plans.