Tethys is a freely available open source temporal-spatial database for metadata related to acoustic recordings. The database is intended to house the metadata from marine mammal detection and localization studies, allowing the user to perform meta analyses or to aggregate data from many experimental efforts based on a common attribute. This resulting database can then be queried based on time, space, or any desired attribute and the results can be integrated with external datasets such as NASA’s Ocean Color, lunar illumination, etc. in a consistent manner. While Tethys is designed primarily for acoustic metadata from marine mammals, the design is general enough to permit use in other areas as well.
Tethys provides a scientific workbench to the practitioner. Rather than providing a stand-alone graphical interface, Tethys provides methods, or subroutines, that can be called from programming environments that practitioners use to conduct their analysis. Currently, Tethys supports Matlab, Java, and Python. The R programming language will be included in the next major release. These methods allow practitioners to access the metadata associated with a specific laboratory or project. Additionally, the tools provide access to environmental data based on spatial location and selected temporal boundaries from a wide variety of online sources.
Currently, the software runs on Windows only, but porting to other platforms would not require significant effort.
Development of the Tethys Metadata project is sponsored by:
The following organizations have participated in the development of Tethys
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