The Crab and the Butterfly - an update on data management

Over the past month, your editor, has made some progress on issues of data management... the nuts and bolts as well as the theory. I must certainly thank Rosalynn Lee for all her help, her willingness to try things out for me, and then, with Mandy Joye, for a real effort in updating their metadata TOC. Here, I want to let you know some of what we have found.
     As you know, there are at least three elements in data archiving - the data set itself, its metadata, and the Table of Contents.
     The first news is about the metadata management. When I took over this part of the project, I immediately looked up the Metamaker page (again) and found the prominent notice that (1) support for the software had long since stopped, and/because (2) it did not meet the prescribed standard.
     Based on this, I went looking for alternatives and found the ecoinformatics website, with the "knowledge network for biocomplexity." They have developed a new metadata manager, Morpho, that is open sourced and free, and has additional characteristics that make it good for ecologists. (Click the Butterfly for more info).
     One thing Morpho developers have recognized is that much ecological data, like ours, has only a minor geographical component, and most metadata programs emphasize that above all else.
     The next news is about progress on organizing data itself. What Roz and I have been working on is this... most of our data are best archived as tables... columns and rows. If you use Excel, this should be the SECOND worksheet in the workbook. The column headings (no units) should be in the first row, with the data below. I, you, or some assistant in the future can reformat this with no worries to tab delimited text, if need be. (TDT is the only REALLY stable format).
     The FIRST worksheet should be the metadata table. I think that we have come up with a pretty good idea here of what this should be... lookee here.
     Looking over the current TOC, it looks like many of the files you have listed contain multiple worksheets and for best accessibilty to you and anyone else, that needs to be changed. I will work with you, but now would be a good time to start changing them. Remember, one highly focussed data set per workbook, robust data only, and Bog's your uncle.