Abstract
There is an expectation that scientists will archive their experimental data online in public repositories to enable other investigators to verify their work and to re-explore their data in search of new discoveries. When left to their own devices, however, scientists do a poor job creating the metadata that describe their datasets. A lack of standardization makes it difficult for other investigators to find relevant datasets and to perform secondary analyses. The Center for Expanded Data Annotation and Retrieval (CEDAR) was founded with the goal of enhancing the authoring of experimental metadata to make online datasets more useful to the scientific community. CEDAR technology includes Web-based methods for creating and managing libraries of templates for representing metadata. CEDAR's templates interoperate with a repository of scientific ontologies to standardize the way in which the templates may be filled out. Collaborations with several major research projects are allowing us to explore how CEDAR may ease access to scientific data sets stored in public repositories.
