Metadata standardization effort

The data structures established in Tethys were used as the initial baseline for the effort to establish a standard for acoustic metadata. The Acoustical Society of America Standards Committee is responsible for establishing standards related to acoustics that are endorsed by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The acoustic metadata group is committee S3-SC1-WG7.

Current members of the group are:

  • Simone Baumann-Pickering – Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Univ. California, San Diego, CA, USA
  • Danielle Cholewiak, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration Northeast Fisheries Science Center
  • Douglas Gillespie, St. Andrews University, St. Andrews, Scotland
  • Shane Guan, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Sterling, VA, USA
  • Jasper Kanes, Ocean Networks Canada, Victoria, BC, Canada
  • Katherine H. Kim, Greenridge Sciences, Inc, Santa Barbara, CA, USA
  • Holger Klinck, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
  • Xavier Mouy, JASCO Applied Sciences, Victoria, BC, Canada
  • Marie A. Roch (chair) – San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA
  • Ana Širović – Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
  • Aaron Thode – Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Univ. California, San Diego, CA, USA
  • Carrie Wall – NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Boulder, CO, USA

The group is tasked with establishing method to describe acoustic recordings, ranging from details about recordings and equipment (currently used by the National Center for Environmental Information’s acoustic archive) to information about the contents of the recordings.

The groups current focus is:

  • A description of different types of scenarios that practitioners of passive acoustic monitoring are likely to need, and a description of what data need to be captured.
  • A structured description of the fields that need to be recorded. Preliminary descriptions are written using schemata for extended markup language, a commonly used format for machine interchange that is readable by humans.
  • Once the first two items are accomplished, a standards document will be written from the structured description.

If you are interested in providing feedback, you are welcome to contact the working group chair, Marie Roch.

  • Draft standard

  • Usage scenarios – Standards can be difficult to interpet without context unless you already know the subject matter very well. This appendix provides examples of how sample bioacoustic applications might use the standards.

  • The standard describes the types of data and their standard names. It is not a wire protocol designed to promote standardized binary compatible transfer of databases. Tethys 3.1 implements most of the proposed standard and uses XML documents conforming to the schemata as a wire protocol (it can also serve data in Javascript object notation – JSON).  The most recent schemata can be accessed via the git repository. Using an XML editor such as Oxygen XML enables interactive graphical representation of the schemata. Click here for a non-interactive graphical representation of the schemata.