Developing WA marine metadata infrastructure

6 October 2009

Metadata from Western Australian Marine Science Institution’s (WAMSI’s) researchers is now being stored in an online database hosted by iVEC.

iVEC offers high performance computing facilities and is an unincorporated joint venture between Perth’s four public universities, CSIRO and State Government.

WAMSI data in the Metadata Entry and Search Tool (MEST) is now able to be searched by WA, national and international researchers.

Much of the information came about through a dedicated WAMSI project – the North West Marine Research Inventory – to unearth past, current and future marine projects in the North West of Australia.

The project created a database of metadata records of completed, current and planned marine and coastal research in State and Commonwealth waters off WA between Kalbarri and the Northern Territory border.

The plan is to increase the number of metadata records by linking to industry and government databases so that it becomes a more comprehensive index of all WA marine research projects.

“This will lead to increased efficiencies and be a useful tool for the marine community,” Luke Edwards, a marine information officer for WAMSI, iVEC, the Western Australian Satellite Technology and Applications Consortium (WASTAC www.wastac.wa.gov.au) and the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS-eMII http://imos.org.au/emii.html), said. 

“All these organisations are helping to facilitate a lasting legacy of marine data discovery, access and sharing in WA,” he said.

Mr Edwards said the initial purpose of installing the MEST at iVEC (http://mest.ivec.org/geonetwork/) was to catalogue the large amount of information from the WAMSI research program, which has more than 250 scientists working on 86 research projects. 

“This will help ensure this WAMSI data is discoverable and able to be used into the future. In addition, this MEST forms part of the IMOS distributed data system with WA IMOS metadata to be stored here and harvested to the central IMOS MEST in Tasmania,” he said.

The metadata in the iVEC MEST is being harvested into national research site, Research Data Australia (http://services.ands.org.au/home/orca/rda/), where it joins other research data collections and is available to be searched through Google.