Next phases of development for Ecological Metadata Language (EML)
The adoption of the Ecological Metadata Language specification (EML) has been key to building network synthesis architectures which are based on high-quality standardized metadata. Several scientific groups such as the Genomics Standards Consortium, the LTER GIS community and the NEON network plan to work further with EML either to directly describe data or to augment specific data collections. Additionally, semantic approaches for data description are emerging, and EML should achieve compatibility with these. This working group will provide a discussion forum for those interested in EML development. Topics include (but are not limited to) compatibility with other markup languages either by cross-walk or integration, possible schema changes to facilitate data descriptions and/or semantic annotations, and the use of EML's modules for more atomic descriptions or for collections of resources.