Digital Commons Network^™

Analytic Webs Support The Synthesis Of Ecological Data Sets, Aaron M. Ellison, Leon J. Osterweil, Lori Clarke, Julian L. Hadley, Alexander Wise, Emery Boose, David R. Foster, Allen Hanson, David Jensen, Paul Kuzeja, Edward Riseman, Hward Schultz

Computer Science Department Faculty Publication Series

A wide variety of data sets produced by individual investigators are now synthesized to address ecological questions that span a range of spatial and temporal scales. It is important to facilitate such syntheses so that ‘‘consumers’’ of data sets can be confident that both input data sets and synthetic products are reliable. Necessary documentation to ensure the reliability and validation of data sets includes both familiar descriptive metadata and formal documentation of the scientific processes used (i.e., process metadata) to produce usable data sets from collections of raw data. Such documentation is complex and difficult to construct, so it is …