CEDAR: Metadata Tool for ESIP

In this lightning talk for the ESIP Metadata Tools: Talks and Discussion session, John Graybeal demonstrated the use of CEDAR to quickly model and test a metadata entry form. In roughly 2 hours (before the talk, not during it), the author took the model presented in yesterday's EnviroSensing/Drones session and turned it into a CEDAR metadata template (viewable with a CEDAR account, which could in turn be filled out as metadata in CEDAR.

In the overview of CEDAR in the (viewable in CEDAR with account) Introduction to CEDAR template, we presented the answers to the questions posed for these lightning talks.

1. Purpose
   1. Services for a semantic and rigorous metadata life cycle
2. Strengths
   1. Very modern easy-to-use interface
   2. General-purpose metadata specification that is highly flexible and semantic-aware
   3. Deployable as part of other repositories
   4. Supports iterative model and test of your metadata collection
   5. Social features for sharing with groups and individuals
   6. Comprehensive APIs
   7. Very open (visible) development process
3. Weaknesses
   1. Indeterminate long-term funding
   2. Any particular things you wanted that it doesn't have (yet)
   3. Development challenge: Semantics takes time to get right (and harder to get semantically rigorous)
4. Planned Improvements
   1. See https://waffle.io/metadatacenter/features
5. Killer Improvements
   1. Templates (content) that support wide variety of standards
   2. Curation tooling
   3. Multi-repository support