Data exchange in peatland science and HXL

[Dylan Young]

Dear All,

  I work in peatland science. One of the projects I've been working on as part of a community of practice is data exchange. It's often difficult and awlays very time consuming to exchange our data because various different formats are used across organisations and researchers. We've tried other approaches to standardisation but they haven't worked. A colleague suggested I look at your work to see if it would be applicable for us. Having read about HXL we think your approach could provide us with a way of exchanging our data. We've been doing some pilot tests and people seem to like the tagging idea for its speed and simplicity.

  We're making sure we follow the terms of the CC BY 4.0 license and we're clearly stating that what we're doing is closely based on HXL. However, I wanted to make your community aware of what we're doing and how your work has helped us move on from what seemed to be a bit of an intractable problem. 

  It's very early days but we're hopeful that we can make good progress by adopting your approach. I've put up the current version of the documents we're using on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/records/17348934). All the documents need a lot more work but it's a starting point. There's also a technical standard that links to other data ontologies but I'm working on reformatting it before uploading.The terms in the standard ultimately become tags. We're currently calling it Peatland Exhange Tags. I hope that's okay.

  We'd also be grateful for any criticims, advice or guidance from you.

Many thanks and best wishes,

Dylan

Dr Dylan Young

University of Leeds, UK.