SOFIA - South Florida Information Access

The south Florida ecosystem, encompassing Everglades National Park, urban areas on the coast, intensely developed agricultural areas, rangelands, and wetlands, has been altered greatly during the last 100 years. Resource managers

Figure 1. Sample of the outline format for FGDC metadata. Click for larger image.

within Federal, State, and local agencies and other groups are seeking to reverse environmentally damaging actions of the past. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) began a research program in support of the restoration of the Everglades and south Florida ecosystem in 1995. USGS scientists have been conducting research projects designed to provide sound scientific information on which resource managers can base their decisions. The USGS also has recognized the need for a central site to provide all interested parties with information from this research and access to the data. The south Florida Information Access website (SOFIA) was created as a “one-stop-shopping” access point for research on south Florida. All USGS South Florida Place-Based Studies (PBS) Program research projects, ranging from monitoring mercury contamination in the Everglades to investigating coral reef decline, are online at this site. The website provides project descriptions, publication references, data, presentations, and contact information, as well as general interest items, such as photographs and posters.

A primary goal of the USGS PBS Program is providing sound scientific data and synthesis of research results to aid managers in making responsible decisions regarding restoration of the Everglades and the ecosystems of south Florida. The next major effort is to make the research data and synthesis easily accessible to managers, scientists, and the public.

A tool for doing this is metadata. The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) developed a common set of definitions and terminology for geospatial data to be used for documenting the data and for searching to identify potentially useful data sets. Metadata provide information about the data, such as the name of the data set, the reason it was created, who created it, how accurate the data are, the physical location of the data on the ground, restrictions on using the data, and how to obtain the data.

The format for FGDC-compliant metadata is often confusing to generate and read unless the user is familiar with the document that gives the metadata element names and definitions. The most common format for FGDC metadata records is referred to as the outline form (fig. 1). It was designed for ease in searching on specific elements, such as geographic coor-dinates, places, topics, or even an individual project chief’s name. Peter Schweitzer of the USGS has developed an alternate format to make the metadata more user friendly. This format is called Question and Answer and presents the metadata as a series of questions and responses to the questions. (Figure 2 shows the question part of the format, and figure 3 shows the answers with the questions.)

The metadata part of the SOFIA website documents current and previous research conducted by the USGS. Most of the projects have FGDC-compliant metadata, with the exception of some projects started in fiscal year 2000. Work is continuing on using FGDC-compliant metadata to document data sets available on the SOFIA Data Exchange pages. Eventually historical data sets will be included to allow time-series studies to be conducted. The collection of metadata for relevant data from other Federal, State, and local agencies is in progress. The metadata for projects and data sets will be updated as new information is obtained from project chiefs.

FGDC-compliant metadata records on the SOFIA site are in three formats – HTML, plain text, and the Question and Answer format. It is hoped that making metadata available in the latter, more readable format will encourage users to browse and discover what types of data are available through the SOFIA site.

Visit the SOFIA website at http://sofia.usgs.gov/. The outline form of the metadata is also available through the FGDC Clearinghouse (http://clearinghouse1.fgdc.gov/FGDCgateway.html [now http://clearinghouse1.fgdc.gov/]) by searching on the South Florida Ecosystem Project database.

South Florida Information Access (SOFIA) Metadata