Organizing information for users

Organizing the collection

• NSDI brings together a wide variety of types of data
• People need context in order to find, get and use those data
• Context <= relationship
• Relationships are semantic, not structural
• But users depend on consistent structure to see them

Keywords in the metadata structure

• Keywords separated by general type:
  • Theme, Place, Stratum, Temporal
• Source given for each term (thesaurus)
• Software helps categorize parseable records
• Role of collection manager (editor)