A multilingual metadata catalog for the ILTER: Issues and approaches

The International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) Network's strategic plan calls for widespread data exchange among member networks to support broad scale synthetic studies of ecological systems. However, natural language differences are common among ILTER country networks and seriously inhibit the exchange, interpretation and proper use of ecological data. As a first step toward building a multilingual metadata catalog, the ILTER has adopted Ecological Metadata Language (EML) as its standard, and ILTER members are asked to share discovery level metadata in English. Presently, the burden of translation is on the data providers, who frequently have few resources for information management. Tools to assist with metadata capture and translation, such as localized metadata editors and a multilingual environmental thesaurus, are needed and will be developed in the near future. In the longer term, ILTER will cooperate with other communities to develop ontologies that may be used to automate the process of translation and will produce the most linguistically and semantically accurate metadata translations.