Project

General

Profile

1
<!DOCTYPE html PUBliC "-//W3C//DTD html 4.0//EN">
2
<html>
3

    
4
<head>
5
  <title>KNB Software: Metacat</title>
6
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="@docrooturl@default.css">
7
</head>
8

    
9
<body>
10

    
11
<table class="tabledefault" width="100%">
12
<tr>
13
  <td rowspan="2"><img src="@docrooturl@images/KNBLogo.gif"></td>
14
  <td colspan="7"><div class="title">Metacat: the flexible XML database</div></td>
15
</tr>
16
<tr>
17
  <td><a href="@server@/" class="toollink"> KNB Home </a></td>
18
  <td><a href="@server@/data.html" class="toollink"> Data </a></td>
19
  <td><a href="@server@/people.html" class="toollink"> People </a></td>
20
  <td><a href="@server@/informatics" class="toollink"> Informatics </a></td>
21
  <td><a href="@server@/biodiversity" class="toollink"> Biocomplexity </a></td>
22
  <td><a href="@server@/education" class="toollink"> Education </a></td>
23
  <td><a href="@server@/software" class="toollink"> Software </a></td>
24
</tr>
25
</table>
26
<hr>
27

    
28
<p>&nbsp;</p>
29
<table class="tabledefault" width="100%">
30
<tr>
31
  <td class="tablehead" colspan="2"><p class="label">Metacat: the flexible 
32
      XML Database</p></td>
33
</tr>
34
<tr>
35
  <td>
36
  <p><a href="@server@/software/download.html">Download Metacat</a></p>
37
  <p><a href="./metacatinstall.html">Metacat Installation Instructions</a></p>
38
  <p>Metacat is a flexible metadata database. It utilizes 
39
     <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml" target="offline">XML</a> as a 
40
     common syntax for representing the large number of metadata content
41
     standards that are relevant to ecology.  Thus, Metacat is a generic XML
42
     database that allows storage, query, and retrieval of arbitrary XML 
43
     documents without prior knowledge of the XML schema.
44
  </p>
45
  <p>
46
     The Metacat database models XML documents as a DOM tree, basically 
47
     decomposing the nodes of the XML document and storing the node data
48
     as a series of records in a relational database via a JDBC connection.
49
     At this point, only Oracle and PostgreSQL have been tested as a backend databases, but
50
     we have avoided RDBMS specific features in order to maintain portability
51
     to other relational databases.
52
  </p>
53
  <p>
54
     Metacat is implemented as a Java Servlet, and so communicates using basic
55
     HTTP protocol semantics.  The figure below shows the basic structure of
56
     the Metacat architecture. A well defined interface for inserting, 
57
     updating, deleting, querying, and transforming (using XSL) XML documents
58
     is presented.  We would like to add the DOM API as an alternative 
59
     supported mechanism for interacting with Metacat, but have not yet
60
     implemented this functionality.
61
  </p>
62
  <p><img src="./metacat.gif" /></p>
63
  </td>
64
</tr>
65
<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
66

    
67
<tr>
68
  <td>The pages below provide more detailed descriptions of the 
69
      various components of the Metacat Servlet. Take the Metacat Tour for 
70
      a detailed look at the algorithms and implementation of Metacat.
71

    
72
    <ul>
73
      <li> <a href="./metacattour.html">A Tour of Metacat</a></li>
74
      <li> <a href="./dev/api/index.html" target="offline">Javadoc API 
75
           Documentation</a></li>
76
    </ul>
77
  </td>
78
</tr>
79
<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
80

    
81
</table>
82

    
83
<p class="contact">
84
Web Contact: <a href="mailto:jones@nceas.ucsb.edu">jones@nceas.ucsb.edu</A>
85
</p>
86
</body>
87
</html>
(17-17/52)