Metacat

Version: 1.4.0 Release

              Saurabh Garg (sgarg@nceas.ucsb.edu)

              Duane Costa (dcosta@lternet.edu)

documents and associated binary files. Metacat models the structure of the

XML document, therefore allowing storage of XML documents with arbitrary

schemas. Metacat supports several databases on the back-end, including Oracle,

PostgreSQL and SQL Server (limited).  The server supports XML document

storage, retrievel, query, validation, and transformation (using the XSLT

stylesheet language).  In addition, there is a mechanism for replicating the

database to other metacat instances for backup and load balancing purposes.

Metacat currently uses an LDAP database for authenticating users, but was

written to accomodate other authentication services as well.

Release Notes for 1.4.0:

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This is a major release, and is the first to introduce many new features to

Metacat.  Some of the major new features in this version of Metacat include:

* Added a new 'Harvester' that allows documents to be periodically pulled

  from distributed sources into metacat, useful for interfacing with other

  system types. See the Metacat Tour for details.

* Added new 'skins' capability to allow the GUI for the metacat web interface

  to be more easily customized to fit into site needs.  The skin is based on

  a flexible mix of XSLT, CSS, and Javascript.

* Added a web-based metadata entry form for submitting EML limited EML documents

  as part of a data registry.  The GUI for the registry is customizable and 

  is integrated with the 'skins' system for the main metacat interface.  The

  registry subsystem is written in Perl, and can simultaneously be used to 

  present multiple 'registry' interfaces.

* A new 'client API' has been developed and implemented in Java and in Perl 

  so that metacat functions can be accessed from any program in those

  languages.  The client API supports the major metacat servlet actions,

  including login(), logout(), query(), insert(), update(), delete(), and 

  upload(). See the Metacat Tour for details.

* Added a new 'getlog' action that produces a usage history for all major

  events.  So now an XML report can be generated for document reads, inserts,

  deletes, etc.  See the new section in the Metacat Tour.

* Added a new 'buildindex' action that can rebuild the index entries for any

  document in the database.

* The configuration file for metacat (metacat.properties) has been moved out

  of the jar file and into the WEB-INF directory, allowing far easier changes

  to the configuration parameters.

* Results in default web interface are sorted by title in the XSLT (configurable)

* Several significant and insignificant bugs were fixed.

Details of all changes can be found in the bug database here:

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/buglist.cgi?product=Metacat&target_milestone=1.4

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If you discover a bug please report it, either by email (above) or by using

our bug tracking system (http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org). There is a

list of currently unimplemented features in Bugzilla that we are working on

for the next release.

National Science Foundation under Grant No. DEB99-80154, DBI99-04777, and

0225676.  Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed

in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect