EDI Dataset Preparation Guides
This website contains a series of documents about preparing and publishing datasets in the environmental sciences and similar contexts. Topics include community-developed metadata standards, serialization and markup formatting guidelines, best practices for content in ecological synthesis datasets, and more. This documentation is maintained by the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) and all content has been developed and written in collaboration with EDI’s community of scientists, data managers, and repository users.
The purpose of these guides is to:
- Provide guidance for creating published data products that are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR, Wilkinson et al. 2016)
- Augment the schema documentation for the Ecological Metadata Language (EML, Jones et al. 2019)
- Facilitate the development and use of community-standard harmonized data products to improve data synthesis and integration
To contribute to these documents or participate in the associated working groups, see the About page or the repository README.
The guides
| Date | Title | Description | Categories | |
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Feb 19, 2021 | Data Package Design for Special Cases | Considerations for creating well-designed datasets that include data specialized by type, format, or acquisition method. Examples are images, code, documents, and raw data in other repositories. This is Version 1, written by the LTER/EDI Non-tabular Data Working Group. | published |
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Nov 15, 2024 | Best Practices for Dataset Metadata in Ecological Metadata Language | These recommendations for creating EML metadata documents can be applied to most research datasets. This is Version 4 (2024), written by the LTER/EDI EML Best Practices Working Group. Find earlier versions here. | draft |
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Nov 15, 2024 | Ecological community survey data (ecocomDP) | This guide covers how to format community survey and biodiversity data to the “ecocomDP” harmonized data model. The ecocomDP standard and associated tools are a community-supported project involving the LTER Network, NEON, and others. | draft |
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References
Jones, Matthew, Margaret O’Brien, Bryce Mecum, Carl Boettiger, Mark Schildhauer, Mitchell Maier, Timothy Whiteaker, Stevan Earl, and Steven Chong. 2019. “Ecological Metadata Language Version 2.2.0.” KNB Data Repository. https://doi.org/10.5063/F11834T2.
Wilkinson, Mark D., Michel Dumontier, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Gabrielle Appleton, Myles Axton, Arie Baak, Niklas Blomberg, et al. 2016. “The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship.” Scientific Data 3 (1): 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.