The EU has recently seen fit to fund a new project called METAFOR.

The main objective of metafor is:

to develop a ''Common Information Model (CIM)" to describe climate data an the models that produce it in a standard way, and to ensure the wide adoption of the CIM. Metafor will address the fragmentation and gaps in availability of metadata (data describing data) as well as the duplication of information collection and problems of identifying, access and using climate data that are currently found in existing repositories.

Our main role is in deploying services to connect CIM descriptions of climate and data across European (and hopefully wider) repositories, but right now the team is concentrating on an initial prototype CIM - building on previous work done by many projects (including Curator).

A number of my recent activities have already been aimed at metafor … in particular the standards review that is currently underway will inform both metafor and MOLES.

For some reason my fellow project participants want to do much of their cogitation on private email lists and fora. While I don’t think that’s the best way forward, I have to respect the joint position. However, I will blog about METAFOR as much as I can, and I’ll obviously be keen to take any feedback to the team.