Metadata guides for smarties

Formal descriptions of data are neccesary to make data useful, to properly catalog it in a repository, and to make it fully available to the community. Scientists are often forced to spend much of their time dealing with the problems of data formats and descriptions, when they could be concentrating on research. The Marine Metadata Initiative wants to provide the necessary guides for scientists to describe and publish their data properly and at the same time minimize the time needed for this task. The MMI guides reflect the best tools, standards, technologies, and procedures available for use by marine scientists. This talk will describe the guides being developed for the MMI website for and by the marine science community, and will provide examples to help scientists catalog their data more efficiently, so they can focus more on their research projects.