The goals of the EAP-ILTER information management are: 1. to create a data legacy for current and future uses; and 2. to provide policy makers with science-based environmental information. Metadata is one of the keys to achieve the goals. A framework of an ecological information management prototype based on EML is proposed, tested, and evaluated over the last five years in EAP-ILTER.
     The conceptual framework of the system was developed by the Ecological Informatics Working Group of the Taiwan Forestry Research Institute (TFRI) in collaboration with the US-LTER information managers to aid editing, storage and usage of documents in multiple Asian languages.
    The system consists of three hierarchical tiers. The first, or lowest, tier deals with sensor network. The second, or middle, tier relates to information management. Once datasets and other related information have been documented, they are stored in a schema-independent database. The third, or uppermost, tier is comprised of a grid computing and scientific workflow that allows users to easily access and use data in the middle tier. We assembled the existing tools such as Morpho, Metacat and Kepler developed by KNB and SEEK projects of the United States to form the system. However, several items of these tools we adopted were modified to be able to display Asian languages and data formats have been collected as follows.
    1. raw data storage from file system to Storage Resource Broker (SRB) in Metacat
    2. specific language interface in Morpho
    3. raw data accessing control function in EML documents
    4. data QA/QC in Morpho
    5. mutilpe-language searching in the query system
    6. zipping large raw data in Morpho
    7. updating raw data, defining missing data, and editing organization name in Morpho

    A suitability test of the system for multiple language users was conducted through three international workshops in the member networks, specifically China, Taiwan and Korea in 2005, 2006, and 2007, respectively. There were in total 150 participants attending these workshops. They were scientists from ten EAP-ILTER Member Networks, namely Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Mongolia, and the US LTER networks. The system was found suitable for many Asian languages and welcomed by many EAP-ILTER Member networks.
    It is suggested that the compiled system could be adopted to store, manage and retrieve data through the metadata in the ecological community of the Asian region, and perhaps for other LTER regions with modifications as well.