Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata specification developed by the ecology discipline and for the ecology discipline. It is based on prior work done by the Ecological Society of America and associated efforts (Michener et al., 1997, Ecological Applications). EML is implemented as a series of XML document types that can by used in a modular and extensible manner to document ecological data. Each EML module is designed to describe one logical part of the total metadata that should be included with any ecological dataset. The EML project is an open source, community oriented project dedicated to providing a high-quality metadata specification for describing data relevant to the ecological discipline. The project is completely comprised of voluntary project members who donate their time and experience in order to advance information management for ecology. Project decisions are made by consensus according to the voting procedures described in the ecoinformatics.org Charter. ... [Information of the supplier]
The Environment Ontology (EnvO) provides a controlled, structured vocabulary that is designed to support the annotation of any organism or biological sample with environment descriptors. EnvO contains terms for biomes, environmental features, and environmental material. Examples of biome terms are: boreal moist forest biome, tropical rain forest biome, and oceanic pelagic zone biome. Examples of environmental feature terms are: mountain, pond, whale fall, and karst. Examples of environmental material terms are: sediment, soil, water, and air These three sets of terms enable a concise, standardised, and comprehensive description of environment that is key to the integration, archiving and federated searching of environmental data. As a tool for the life sciences, we see EnvO bringing similar benefits to the Gene Ontology (GO). Through promoting consistent annotation grounded in an ontological framework, we hope to facilitate the semantic retrieval of any biological record anchored to EnvO. Records contained in sequence databases, omic data repositories, tissue banks and museum collections are prime candidates for EnvO annotation.However, EnvO is also suitable for the annotation of any record that has an environmental component. For example, you can use EnvO terms to provide information on the environment of remote sensing devices or simply to tag a picture that you took at the weekend. Further, the EnvO project is closely tied with GAZ, a first step towards an open source gazetteer constructed on ontological principles. GAZ describes places and place names as well as the relations between them and, when linked with EnvO descriptors, provides a basis to infer environment from place names. ... [Information of the supplier]
