Creating Metadata Standards for Animal Behavior: Conference Feb 2004

Cornell Univ - State: Awds Made Prior May 2010, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

Numerous databases, rich media archives, and educational projects focused on animal behavior are now Internet-accessible. However, each site has adopted its own vocabulary for cataloging its resources and there is currently no mechanism to translate between them. This project funds two successive workshops to create an international metadata standard that will allow users to search across all of these sites and locate similar resources regardless of local catalog names and structures. The meetings will convene experts in animal behavior, zoo management, conservation, and metadata architecture to create a draft standard and design protocols for crosstalk between each database and the standard. The drafts will be circulated through relevant newsletters, journals, and at society meetings worldwide for review and comment. The second workshop will pool comments from all of these sources into a final draft to be mounted on multiple websites and advertised in suitable journals. This project is a key step towards providing worldwide but integrated access to the increasing diversity of animal behavior archives by students, educators, researchers, conservation and wildlife management staff, zoos and aquaria, and both public and commercial media.