| Very early in the Cast-Net project it was recognized that metadata was a critical component of successfully linking databases across the region. |
The amount of research conducted around the nation, or even within a region, is staggering. If the resulting data are not widely shared or easily accessible, then efforts might be duplicated, wasting time and money, and coastal resource managers may miss key information that could help them in their decision-making processes.
"There's a real bottleneck when trying to find and access data," says Madilyn Fletcher, director of the Baruch Institute for Marine and Coastal Sciences at the University of South Carolina.
"We recognized that one of the main impediments to being able to access the many databases that exist among the various marine labs was that there was no inventory or central catalogue identifying the various databases."
To create such a catalogue for accessing data there needs to be metadata, or information about the data.
To help address the issue in the Southeast, five regional research institutions partnered to create Cast-Net, a program that developed an on-line, user-friendly tool that allows researchers to easily write, edit, and access metadata that meets Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) standards.
After being used successfully for the past two years, a new and improved version of the Cast-Net tool will soon be released as Meta-Door.
Information Overload
There is a tremendous amount of research data that exists, which can be overwhelming for busy coastal resource managers.
Elizabeth L. Wenner, senior marine scientist with the South Carolina Marine Resources Research Institute, notes that in a past project to access water quality data for all the National Estuarine Research Reserves (NERRs) around the country, staff members had to sort through 7 million metadata records.
"We had to pull that information in and go through the metadata in order to determine what data to keep," Wenner says. Even with several people working on the project, sorting through all the data took four months.
Casting a Wide Net
Cast-Net was developed by the Southern Association of Marine Laboratories (SAML) and the Southeastern Universities Research Association to help improve connectivity between coastal observing systems in the Southeast U.S.
The name, says Fletcher, signifies "casting the net wider" to include as many coastal ocean observing systems and laboratories as possible.
The institutions working together to cast that net are the Baruch Institute, Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography of the University System of Georgia, and the University of Southern Mississippi.
Very early in the Cast-Net project it was recognized that metadata was a critical component of successfully linking databases across the region.
"The problem," says Fletcher, "was that for metadata to exist, someone at each home laboratory had to create metadata and document it in a way that it could be incorporated into a central catalogue."
To do this, the metadata entries needed to be short and easily searchable using consistent language.
"The bottleneck almost always existed in the marine laboratories with their shortage of personnel," Fletcher notes. "How could we address that problem? We decided to make an on-line metadata entry tool, which could be accessed at the individual laboratories and could lead the metadata entry person through the process in a way that would result in metadata records that had a basic consistency and met existing national standards."
Right in Style
Creating the Automated Cast-Net Entry Tool involved the review and adoption of metadata standards, development of style sheets, integration into the Cast-Net servers, and data verification programming.
After beta testing Cast-Net, members of the project committee held training workshops and one-on-one tutorials for staff members of interested SAML labs.
In addition to general use by those labs, Cast-Net has been used in the implementation of a number of specific research and environmental programs, such as the Land Use–Coastal Ecosystem Study (LU-CES), a multidisciplinary effort to study and document the relationship between changing land use and its effects on marine ecosystems.
"The valuable role Cast-Net is playing through the University of South Carolina," says Rick DeVoe, executive director of the South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium, "is to serve as the database management and information portal for all the data collected by the 24 scientists" involved in LU-CES.
Fletcher notes that while efforts to promote Cast-Net have focused thus far on academic laboratories, "some of the richest data sets exist in state agency systems. As we facilitate the development of metadata records, it is essential to do it in a way that can be easily accessed by agencies and managers who can use them for informed decision making and doing the jobs they have to do."
The Net Results
"I think one of the things that is really valuable about Cast-Net is that it is easy to use," says Sam Walker, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NERR graduate research fellow at the University of South Carolina. "You always hear that with digital technology, but this is, in fact, very user friendly."
This ease of use, Walker says, is facilitated by it being Internet accessible and interactive "so that you don't have to finish everything all at once, which is good for managers and users strapped for time."
He adds, "I used Cast-Net for two years, and it worked better than anything else we had."
Entering Another Door
As with any digital application, Walker and other Cast-Net users also found limitations. The next generation of Cast-Net will be Meta-Door, which is expected to be beta tested and ready for public use by early 2005.
Walker notes, "Cast-Net really focuses on documenting data. Meta-Door takes the next step to facilitating the use of data."
Meta-Door, developed within the context of the Carolinas Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction System, "is designed to handle the needs of a broad range of contemporary users of ocean, coastal, and environmental data," and will provide "greater reliability, flexibility, and potential for enhancements," Fletcher says.
Fletcher notes that coastal managers will be able to use Meta-Door to examine "water quality issues, erosion issues, fisheries issues—one of the things we anticipate this system allowing us to do is mine a variety of data sets."
Walker, who has been beta testing Meta-Door, is excited about the new product. "It's excellent. I've been working on and off with FGDC-compliant tools pretty much since they started about 10 years ago. This is definitely the most effective and efficient tool I've seen on-line."
For more information on Cast-Net, go to www.cast-net.org. You also may contact Madilyn Fletcher at (803) 777-5288, or fletcher@biol.sc.edu. For more information on Federal Geographic Data Committee metadata standards, go to www.fgdc.gov.
