Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata standard developed by and for the

ecology Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their Natural environment, environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosystem, and biosphere lev ...

discipline. It is based on prior work done by the

Ecological Society of America The Ecological Society of America (ESA) is a professional organization of ecological scientists. Based in the United States and founded in 1915, ESA publications include peer-reviewed journals, newsletters, fact sheets, and teaching resources. I ...

and others, including the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. EML is a set of

XML schema An XML schema is a description of a type of XML document, typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type, above and beyond the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. These constrai ...

documents that allow for the structural expression of

metadata Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive ...

. It was developed specifically to allow researchers to document a typical data set in the ecological sciences. EML is largely designed to describe digital resources, however, it may also be used to describe non-digital resources such as paper maps and other non-digital media. The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity project has developed a software client specifically to address this need. Morpho Higgins, D, C Berkley, and M Jones (2002) Managing heterogeneous ecological data using Morpho. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical Database Management, July 24–26. https://doi.org/10.1109/SSDM.2002.1029707 is data management software intended for generating metadata in EML format. Morpho is part of the

DataONE logo DataONE is a network of interoperable data repositories facilitating data sharing, data discovery, and open science. Originally supported by $21.2 million in funding from the US National Science Foundation as one of the initial DataNet pro ...

Investigator Toolkit, and therefore intended to facilitate data sharing and reuse among ecologists and environmental scientists.

References

{{Reflist

External links

KNB-EML webpage

Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity

Morpho Portal

DataONE
Ecological data Metadata standards