UKMMAS Marine Protocols Group

This is one of the working groups under UKMMAS that is responsible for coordinating the development and implementation of standards and protocols for use across the UKMMAS programme. The group reports to the Marine Assessment and Reporting Group (MARG). Part of the groups remit will be to oversee the compilation and maintenance of the Marine Monitoring Manual. This manual will be an online browsable collation of all existing protocols and standards relevant to UK marine monitoring.

Metadata Standards

ISO19115 Geographic Information - Metadata, is an international standard which was published in May 2003 that sets out a number of metadata fields for describing spatial information datasets. ISO 19139 (Geographic Information - Metadata - XML schema implementation) is the standard that aims to define an XML encoding for the metadata elements defined in ISO 19115 and this is currently at ISO Committee Draft stage.

The UK GEMINI Discovery Metadata Standard is a defined element set for describing geo-spatial, discovery level metadata within the United Kingdom. It is derived and therefore compliant with ISO 19115 Geographic Information – Metadata and the UK eGovernment Metadata Standard (eGMS). GEMINI was originated by the Association for Geographic Information and the e-Government Unit of the Cabinet Office and the UK Data Archive and created from a rigorous process of national consultation, feedback and revision. The project was managed by a steering group representing central and local government, the private sector, academia and the geo-spatial industry. Further information can be found at the GIgateway and a report is available here. MEDAG is currently developing a simple guide to ISO 19115 which will become available here in the near future.

Controlled Vocabularies

Interoperability between datasets is impeded if different codes are used for the same term. Using common vocabularies is therefore the first and an essential step to improving interoperability.
Part of the remit of the EU SeaDataNet project is to develop controlled vocabularies and these may be downloaded at: http://seadatanet.maris2.nl/v_bodc_vocab/welcome.aspx
Other controlled vocabularies also exist, for example those used by the ICES community which is available at http://www.ices.dk/datacentre/reco/
Using an agreed term for a species is also fundamental for sharing biological data. The European Register of Marine Species (ERMS) is an authoritative taxonomic list of species occurring in the European marine environment. ITIS is a USA based taxanomic list used widely in the UK.
Link ERMS http://www.marbef.org/data/erms.php
Link IT IS http://www.itis.gov/