News

Release of ezEML

September 17, 2020

Susanne Grossman-Clarke

Description

We recently released ezEML, a form-based online application designed to streamline the creation of metadata in the Ecological Metadata Language (EML).

ezEML is aimed at scientists and others who want to prepare their dataset for submission to a data repository but are not themselves proficient in the details of EML editing. ezEML is designed to give such users a do-it-yourself tool that can handle the great majority of typical datasets. It incorporates a User Guide and extensive Help to guide users through its use.

ezEML can be accessed at ezeml.edirepository.org. To use it, you will need an EDI login account. If you do not already have an account, please email us at info@edirepository.org.

Since the EML standard is intended to handle an enormous variety of data scenarios, EML is complex and the learning curve to creating it can be steep. But many data scenarios require only a relatively small subset of EML, and in such scenarios ezEML can greatly simplify the process of creating EML, especially for users who are new to EML or use it only infrequently.

ezEML can be used as a “wizard” leading the user through EML document creation step by step, or it can be used in a more user-directed fashion. Among other things, it supports checking the EML for correctness and completeness, importing EML content from other ezEML documents, uploading data tables and inferring most of their characteristics, and downloading the finished EML document as an EML XML file for downstream use in a data workflow.

ezEML was created by the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI). It employs EDI’s Metapype library, which is a general-purpose framework for creating and validating metadata, along with Metapype’s implementation of validation rules for the EML 2.2.0 standard.

We hope you find it useful, and we welcome your feedback at [support@edirepository.org](mailto:support@edirepository.org!