Metadata Activities in Biology

Abstract

The National Biological Information Infrastructure program has advanced the biological sciences ability to standardize, share, integrate and synthesize data by making the metadata program a core of its activities. Through strategic partnerships, a series of crosswalks for the main biological metadata specifications have enabled data providers and international clearinghouses to aggregate and disseminate tens of thousands of metadata sets describing petabytes of data records. New efforts at the National Biological Information Infrastructure are focusing on better metadata creation and curation tools, semantic mediation for data discovery and other curious initiatives.