Metadata

Metadata is about forms of data relating to other data. For example, metadata can provide a variety of information regarding a document such as author, date revised, relevant key words, etc. Metadata is crucially important for describing collected data, supporting search, and enabling mashups to create new information.

Mission Metadata Requirements

The following metadata is needed for any meaningful mission data collection effort:

• Mission information.  Who, what, when, where, why and how.
• Telemetry datasets. The raw data, as collected or in compressed form.
• Telemetry metadata.  Precise details are needed for each sensor measurement including units, configuration, etc.
• Images and captions.  What does each picture mean?  Tell the viewer what it means.
• Video recordings.  Short clips or links are accepted.  Include start/stop times, location (or correlation to robot-location track), etc.

Current work includes definition of a series of survey forms to facilitate data collection and metadata archiving by robot operators.

Archival Access

It is possible to document "what data was collected?" in precise, searchable ways.  We are able to export database information as precise metadata terms to produce search-accessible catalog entries for the Calhoun Institutional Archive at NPS Dudley Knox Library.

The key to all unmanned systems data-collection efforts is proper annotation of metadata.  This is a fundamentally important task.  Once procedures and operational processes are in production and tested satisfactorily, we are next looking at publishing resource catalog metadata as part of the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) collections.