A metadata approach to evaluate the state of ocean knowledge: strengths, limitations, and application to Mexico

Climate change, mismanaged resource extraction, and pollution are reshaping global marine ecosystems with direct consequences on human societies. Sustainable ocean development requires knowledge and data across disciplines, scales and knowledge types. Although several disciplines are generating large amounts of data on marine socio-ecological systems, such information is often underutilized due to fragmentation across institutions or stakeholders, limited standardization across scale, time or disciplines, and the fact that information is often not searchable within existing databases. Compiling metadata, the information which describes existing sets of data, is an effective tool that can address these challenges, particularly when metadata corresponding to multiple datasets can be combined to integrate, organize and classify multidisciplinary data. Here, using Mexico as a case study, we describe the compilation and analysis of a metadatabase of ocean knowledge that aims to improve acces...

气候变化、资源开发管理失当与污染正重塑全球海洋生态系统，并对人类社会造成直接影响。海洋可持续发展需要跨学科、跨尺度且覆盖多类知识体系的相关数据与认知。尽管多学科领域正产出大量海洋社会-生态系统相关数据，但由于机构与利益相关方的数据分散、跨尺度/跨时间/跨学科的标准化程度不足，且现有数据库内的信息往往无法被检索，此类信息常未得到充分利用。编制元数据（metadata）——即描述现有数据集的相关信息——是解决上述难题的有效手段，尤其当可将多份数据集对应的元数据整合后，能够实现多学科数据的集成、组织与分类。本研究以墨西哥为案例，阐述了一套海洋知识元数据库的构建与分析流程，该数据库旨在提升……