Visualizing The Evolution of Metadata

LTER is a community with many members. In 2004 the EML Best Practices for LTER Sites was released to help site data managers serve community information needs. Pasta provided a tool for consistent creation, evaluation and improvement starting in 2013.

We collected each sites’ metadata from the past 14 years and examined what percentage of records in the yearly collections from each site used the elements in the Best Practices to identify effects of the recommendation and toolkit over time.

To see if collections are improving, we plot element completeness on a radar chart from zero to one. The elements and levels are plotted clockwise from twelve o’clock. Below each plot is the completeness for the collection and number of records analyzed.