Tethys: A workbench for bioacoustic measurements and environmental data

• Published in: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Vol. 134; no. 5_Supplement; p. 4176
• Main Authors: Roch, Marie A., Baumann-Pickering, Simone, Hwang, Daniel, Batchelor, Heidi, Berchok, Catherine L., Cholewiak, Danielle, Hildebrand, John A., Munger, Lisa M., Oleson, Erin M., Rankin, Shannon, Risch, Denise, Širović, Ana, Soldevilla, Melissa S., Van Parijs, Sofie M.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01-11-2013
• ISSN: 0001-4966; 1520-8524
• DOI: 10.1121/1.4831309

A growing number of passive acoustic monitoring systems have resulted in a wealth of annotation information, or metadata, for recordings. These metadata are semi-structured. Some parameters are essentially mandatory (e.g., time of detection and what was detected) while others are highly dependent upon the question that a researcher is asking. Tethys is a metadata system for spatial-temporal acoustic data that provides structure where it is appropriate and flexibility where it is needed. Networked metadata are stored in an extended markup language (XML) database, and served to workstations over a network. The ability to export summary data to OBIS-SEAMAP is in development. The second purpose of Tethys is to serve as a scientific workbench. Interfaces are provided to networked databases, permitting the import of data from a wide variety of sources, such as lunar illumination or sea ice coverage. Interfaces currently exist for Matlab, Java, and Python. Writing data driven queries using a single interface enables quick data gathering from multivariate sources to address hypotheses. Examples showing the results of analysis of acoustic data from acoustic deployment from 26 sites across the Northern Pacific will be shown.