A Multilingual Metadata Catalog for the ILTER: Issues and Approaches
Ecological Informatics 5 (2010) 187–193 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Informatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolinf A multilingual metadata catalog for the ILTER: Issues and approaches Kristin L. Vanderbilt a,⁎, David Blankman b, Xuebing Guo c, Honglin He c, Chau-Chin Lin d, Sheng-Shan Lu d, Akiko Ogawa e, Éamonn Ó Tuama f, Herbert Schentz g, Wen Su c a Sevilleta LTER, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico 87131 USA b LTER-Israel, Ben Gurion University, Midreshet Ben Gurion, Israel c Chinese Ecological Research Network, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China d Taiwan Ecological Research Network, Taiwan Forest Research Institute, Taipei, Taiwan e JaLTER, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tokyo, Japan f GBIF Secretariat, Copenhagen, Denmark g Umweltbundesamt GmbH, Vienna, Austria article info abstract Keywords: The International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) Network's strategic plan calls for widespread data Challenges exchange among member networks to support broad scale synthetic studies of ecological systems. However, Language natural language differences are common among ILTER country networks and seriously inhibit the exchange, Translation interpretation and proper use of ecological data. As a first step toward building a multilingual metadata Ecology catalog, the ILTER has adopted Ecological Metadata Language (EML) as its standard, and ILTER members are Ontology asked to share discovery level metadata in English. Presently, the burden of translation is on the data providers, who frequently have few resources for information management. Tools to assist with metadata capture and translation, such as localized metadata editors and a multilingual environmental thesaurus, are needed and will be developed in the near future.
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