Metacat

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                           http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org

              Chad Berkley (berkley@nceas.ucsb.edu)

              Dan Higgins (higgins@nceas.ucsb.edu)

              Duane Costa (dcosta@lternet.edu)

              Callie Bowdish (bowdish@ecoinformatics.org)

              Will Tyburczy (tyburczy@ecoinformatics.org)

              Chris Barteau (barteau@nceas.ucsb.edu)

              Shaun Walbridge (walbridge@nceas.ucsb.edu)

Patch contributors:

              Andrea Chadden (chadden@nceas.ucsb.edu)

              Owen Jones (owen.jones@imperial.ac.uk)

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

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.

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------------------------

This release focuses on simplifying the Metacat installation process by

creating a binary (war) installation.  The need to build the application

on the server has been removed (although the option is still available).

In order to facilitate this method of installation, a few major modifications

were made to the code:

  -- Ant token replacement was removed for all non-build variables in the

     application (most of this was already done in 1.8.1).

  -- The Metacat properties confguration was moved into the application

     itself.

  -- Database schema version detection and install/upgrade utilities were

     added to the application.

Also, this release includes several enhancements:

  -- it supports the new EML 2.1.0 version.

  -- Documents are now stored on the local filesystem as well as in the

     database in order to preserve document integrity.

  -- Metacat verifies new schemas when they are added.

  -- Additional access is propegated with documents during replication.

High priority bugs were addressed in this release as well.

The enhancements/bugs addressed are:

* escaped "less than" in inlinedata causes invalid eml output (Bug 2564)

* need to set filename for download files (Bug 2566)

* add ability for search engines to index metacat documents (Bug 2826)

* EML citation section should include both organizationNames and individualNames (Bug 3059)

* refactor skins to get organization list from metacat getOrganizations() function (Bug 3114)

* Update dataknp.sanparks.org packageId attributes to match Metacat Ids (Bug 3258)

* New documents explicitly set as public access don't show up correctly (Bug 3262)

* Modify confguration utility in metacat (Bug 3371)

* Integrate perl token replacement changes (Bug 3372)

* Create skin specific configuration utility (Bug 3373)

* Add authentication for configuration utility (Bug 3374)

* Create a sorted properties utility (Bug 3375)

* Add DB upgrade/install functionality to java code (Bug 3376)

* Create ANT install target for developers (Bug 3377)

* Create LSID server installation (Bug 3380)

* Create unit test code for 1.9 additions (Bug 3381)

* create simple turnkey installer for metacat Phase I (Bug 3461)

* Maps do not display in Firefox version 3 (Bug 3462)

* Replicate access rules in replication (Bug 3464)

* Metacat casesensitive="true" option in pathquery expressions is broken (Bug 3472)

* Add full schema checking when metacat register new schema (Bug 3474)

* Incorporate EML 2.1.0 access changes in metacat (Bug 3495)

* getprincipals action returns invalid XML document (Bug 3527)

* Update knbweb to serve new metacat install (Bug 3545)

* Replication should write to disk (Bug 3554)

* Update acknowlegements in metacat readme (Bug 3588)

* Validate the ldap administrator field. (Bug 3616)

* Allow for different authentication services in metacat configuration (Bug 3680)

* Tag utilities module and have metacat check out that tag (Bug 3685)

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legitimate EML 2.0.1 schemas; second, existing invalid EML 2.0.1 documents will be

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3239

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3241

EML 2.0.1 documents from Metacat 1.8.0 or ealier verions may be rejected since Metacat 1.8.1 uses

different EML 2.0.1 schemas (see bug 3239). If this is case, Metacat administrators should notify

their counterparts to upgrade previous version Metacats to 1.8.1.

*Character set (charset) problem when filling out form (Bug2797)

*Charset bug: > "less than" symbol does not display correctly (Bug2517)

*Metacat performance issue in Sanparks skin (Bug 3174)

*Metacat using illegitimate versions of EML schema (Bug 3239)

*Update older invalidated eml201 document in Metacat (Bug 3241)

*Verify existing token changes to skins (Bug 3176)

*The edit feature in the NCEAS Data Repoistory does not work (Bug 2644)

*Expose permission options for registry uploads (Bug 3014)

*ESA registry doesn't have LTER in login dropdown menu (Bug 2647)

*Data Catalog Map is slow when selecting (Bug2732)

*Only one attribute per element returned with pathquery results(Bug 2999)

*The field "skinconfigs" in the MetacatUtil class is public (Bug 3057)

*Generalize the reading of skin.configs in DBTransform (Bug3058)

*The query example in metacatquery.html document need to be changed (Bug3137)

*Add upload method into Metacat tour (Bug 3139)

*Query resultset doesn't show component name in kepler skin (Bug 3178)

*Add fields used in Morpho search to the default indexPaths property (Bug 3259)

*Private data cannot be downloaded from metadata display page (xsl) (Bug 3263)

*An error message happen during the metacat start up (Bug 3279)

*Replication: Timed replication failures occur twice instead of once (Bug 3304)

*Inline Data does not work correctly without the <pre> tag (Bug 3088)

*Include FGDC metadata in KNB and NCEAS skin search results (Bug 3146)

and access control queries were rewritten to execute efficiently.

To improve search performance, a query caching mechanism was introduced.

Cached queries are currently supported only for public users.

* Data registries now support uploading of data objects along with data

  packages (Bug 1982)

* Metacat Performace: Rewrite the xml_nodes queries (Bug 2155)

* Metacat Performace: Rewrite the xml_access part of the query (Bug 2557)

* Query cache mechanism (Bug 2905)

* Metacat Performance: updates from Morpho of data packages are taking

   longer than five minutes (Bug 2805)

* Metacat Performace: Add/drop indices on key columns (Bug 2153)

* I.E. display fixes on default skin (Bug 2579)

* Web Address links fixed (Bug 2147)

  (Bugs 2807, 2925, 2926, 2929, 2030).

* Tomcat 3 and 4 are no longer tested or supported. Users are

  highly encouraged to upgrade to Tomcat 5.5

------------------------

This release features only a few minor changes to the core Metacat engine.

The major focus of this release is the addition of the spatial functionality.

The geographic coverage of metadata documents can now be cached in a GIS-

accessible format and published via web mapping services and an online

interactive map.

* Three new open source libraries have been integrated with Metacat:

  - Geoserver:  A standards-compliant web map server to publish

                geographic data to the web.

                manipulate spatial datasets.

                (http://geotools.codehaus.org/)

  - Mapbuilder: A javascript application to provide an interactive

                web map front-end to Geoserver.

                (http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAP/Home)

* Spatial Caching/Indexing mechanism; documents with geographic

  coverages will be added to the spatial cache.

* Spatial Query action in metacat servlet.

* Interactive Web map to visualize and query the spatial

  distribution of metadata documents.

Compatibility Notices:

* Tomcat 3 and 4 are no longer tested or supported. Users are

  highly encouraged to upgrade to Tomcat 5.5

Bug Fixes:

* Metacat administrators are able to modify and delete documents

  created by other users.

------------------------

This release comes with more performance improvements, initial support for

LSIDs (Life Sciences Identifiers) and FGDC standard, more controls for

Metacat administrators and bug fixes. Below is the list of bug fixes and

performance improvements.

Bug Fixes:

* Improved the indexing algorithm. Earlier indexing failed for some documents

  randomly and used to take a lot of time to complete for others. The

  code for indexing was changed to take care of both these problems.

* Earlier, xmlns prefix was used to determine the namespace of the document.

  Now schemaLocation is used instead xmlns prefix to determine the namespace

  of the document as that is a better indicator of document type.

* INSTR was used in some SQL statements and it is not supported by Postgres.

  So SQL statements were modified so that INSTR is not used.

* Fixed bug in squery which didnt allow use of not-contains

New Features:

* Added FGDC schema and XSLT so that Metacat can handle FGDC standard

* Added support for LSID. This includes modifying the stylesheets to

  display the LSIDs, modifying the build to include a new target

  'install-ldap'.

* Added following access control levels to Metacat:

    1. Administrators - users who can do the following:

       a. Run replication

       b. Delete any document

       c. Modify any document

       d. run indexing for any document

       e. check the logs

    2. allowedUsers - User who are allowed to submit

    3. deniedUsers - Users not allowed to submit

* Added a new skin for Ecological Society of America.

* Various connections have been modified to be secure. e.g. connection between

ldaps is made secure now, replication is done over secure channels.

Performance:

* Reduced size of xml_nodes by creating a new table for holding nodes from

  deleted documents and old revisions of the documents.

* Provided a new variable in metacat.properties where more frequently searched

  for paths can be specified. Seperate indexes are created for these paths

  - so that search is faster.

------------------------

Bug Fixes:

* Modify property values of harvester registration servlets to match the

  servlet-mapping URL values in web.xml. The old values used the servlet

  class names. This worked in Tomcat 4 but seems to break in Tomcat 5 on

  Windows. The new values use the servlet-mapping URL values. This should

  work in both Tomcat 4 and Tomcat 5. (Bug 162)

* Re-implement logic to prune old log entries from the HARVEST_LOG and

  HARVEST_DETAIL_LOG tables. The old logic caused integrity constraint

  violations in the database because it tried to delete parent records from

  HARVEST_LOG prior to deleting child records from

  HARVEST_DETAIL_LOG. (Bug 162)

* In data registry, minor bugs fixed like the error page shows the link back

  to the form when error page was generated because of a document read

  request from search results page,  the successful delete button leading

  to a blank screen and the old ACL overwritten by the registry.

  (Bugs 1307, 1310, 1322, 1344, 1551)

* Changed the code to support insertion of following characters: ', `,

  charcters in the Numeric Character Reference format (&#xyz;) and

  characters like µ. Characters like µ will be converted to and stored in

  Numeric Character Reference format(&#xyz;). They will also be returned

  in Numeric Character Reference and it is upto the client to convert them

  and display them accordingly in the application. Partial fix provided by

  Johnoel Ancheta. (Bug 1538,1711)

* Spatial search failed on Oracle because of invalid entries made by

  some documents in the nodedata column of xml_nodes for paths involving

  'eastBoundingCoordinate', 'westBoundingCoordinate',

  'northBoundingCoordinate', 'southBoundingCoordinate'. A new column

  nodedatanumerical was added to xml_nodes table such that all the numerical

  nodedata is stored in this column and this column is now used for spatial

  search. (Bug 1703, 1718)

* In the default skin, clicking on the keywords on the home page did not

  result is a search being done. Fix provided by Owen Jones. (Bug 1768)

* Metacat generated a success message even when a document which didnt

  exsist was requested for deletion. This has been fixed. (Bug 1850)

* "packagetype" in xml-relation table was entered as eml200 namespace when

  an eml201 document was inserted. This is fixed now so that "packagetype"

  in xml-relation table points to eml201 namespace. (Bug 1979)

* System_id in xml_catalog pointed to http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/knb/

  earlier. Fixed such that it points to the locally installed metacat url.

  (Bug 1986)

* Changes to the Query subsystem fix bugs that prevented attributes from

  being expressed solely in the xpath query statement and the returnfield

  values. For instance, a query URL may now include search strings like

  '@packageId=sbclter%25' and return strings like 'returnfield=@packageId'.

  Previously, the attribute had to be appended to an element:

  '/eml/@packageId=sbclter%25'. These fixes change DBQuery.java,

  QuerySpecification.java, and QueryTerm.java (Bug 2052)

* Search query failed in case of Oracle if number of documents in the result

  were more than 1000. This has been fixed. (Bug 2000)

* Removed any occurence of enum which is now a keyword in Java 1.5

Enhancements:

* Major improvements done in user interface for the data registeries and

  various other skins. Improvements done based on suggestions from Mark

  Stromberg, Laura Downey and others. Improvements also done in resultset.xsl,

  the default skin and ldap templates. (Bug 1948)

* Coded added such that administrator can delete documents irrespective of

  who the document belongs to.

* Performance impovement done in searching of datasets. A part of the search

  time was taken up because of generation of resultset after the search had be

  done. So this was the sequence of events in earlier metacat

  1) Search for the given text

  2) A list of docids generated

  3) For each of the docids

     3a) Use xml_index and xml_nodes table to generate the string descibing

         the document including the returnfields requested in the search

     document. Here a decent amount of time was being taken by step 3a.

  The algorithm is now modified by addition of two tables xml_queryresult and

  xml_returnfields and a user defined parameter xml_returnfield_count. The

  new algorithm works as follows:

     if that string exists in xml_returnfields

     3a) If string does not exist in xml_returnfield, then enter a new

         record usage_count as 1 and returnfield_string as the unique string

         generated above.

     3b) Else if the string exists, increment usage_count

  4) Given the docids from step 2 and the id of the returnfield record from

     step 3, query for any docids that already exist in xml_queryresult.

     For the docids that do exist, get the queryresult_string.

  5) For rest of the docids from step2 which were not found in step 4, do

     the following for each of the documents:

     5a) Use xml_index and xml_nodes table to generate the string descibing

         the document including the returnfields requested in the search

     5b) If usage_count of the record from step is more than

         xml_returnfield_count set in metacat.properties, then store the

         string in xml_queryresult as a record which has the returnfield_id

         representing the set of returnfields, docid representing the

         document and the string as queryresult_string.

  6) Add all the strings from step 4 and step 5a to send back the resultant

     document

  So the results from step 3a in previous algorithm are effectively cached

  and hence same computation is not done again and again for each search.

  When a document is deleted, all the entries for that document in

  xml_queryresult table are also deleted. When a document is updated, all

  the entries for that document in xml_queryresult table are deleted. This

  works fine because those entries will be generated and cached again the

  next time the document is part of a search is requested.

* Performance impovement done for % search.

* Following new functions added to metacat client API: a method to set access

  on an xml document and a method to get newest version for a given document.

* Implement a new HarvesterServlet for running Harvester as a servlet. This

  eliminates the need to run Harvester in a terminal window. By default, the

  HarvesterServlet is commented out in lib/web.xml.tomcat(3,4,5). The user

  documentation will be modified to instruct Harvester administrators to

  uncomment the HarvesterServlet entry.

* Minor enhancement to support multiple email addresses for harvester

  administrator and site contact. Each address is separated by a comma or

  semicolon.

* Increase number of rows in Harvest List Editor from 300 to 1200.

* Changed default maxHarvests value to 0. Added logic to ignore maxHarvests

  value when it is set to 0 or a negative number. This allows Harvester to

  run indefinitely without shutting down after reaching a maximum number of

  harvests. The previous default value of 30 would cause Harvester to

  terminate after 30 harvests.

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

http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org/buglist.cgi?product=Metacat&target_milestone=1.5

------------------------

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.

  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.

  (configurable)

* Many 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

include:

    Java 1.3 and Java 1.4. Currently, Metacat 1.3.1 will work in both Java 1.3

    and Java 1.4.

Release Notes for 1.3.0

In 1.3.0 release, the structure of the xml_access table was changed and a new

installed Metacat, you should run a script file to updated the table structure

before installation.

For Oracle user: At the SQLPLUS prompt type the following -

@src/reviseformetacat13.sql

For Postgresql user: At install directory prompt type the following -

psql exp < src/reviseformetacat13_postgres.sql

(where 'exp' is the database name).

schema in xml_catalog table.

If you are a new Metacat user, this step is unneeded.

         it will cause potential replication issues.

      2) Delete the xercesImpl.jar and xmlParserAPIs.jar files

         which are in $CATALINA_HOME/common/endorsed. They are old version and

         don't support XML schema validation.

  1) Partialy support EML2 document. User can store, query, read and write

     EML2 documents. However, Metacat only support access control in resource

     level. The subtree level access control will be ignored.

  2) Support other xml document base on namespace/schema.

  3) Support query for attribute value

  4) Assign MIME type to data file base on metadata when user try to read it.

  5) Owner can assign access rules to a document which does not have access

     document to apply it.

  6) Support exporting single file, not only whole package

Fixes in 1.3.0:

  1) Couldn't finish delta T replication for large set of documents.

  2) Couldn't create access control during delta T replication.

  3) Eorr will be written to a seperated log file if some documents

     were failed in replication.

  4) Decrease the time to create access rules during insert or update

     a package.

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Contributions to this work are welcome.  Please see the above web site

for details on how to contribute.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.

Legalese

--------

and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

and licensed under the GNU GPL; see the 'LICENSE' file for

details.

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

reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Mellon Foundation.

for details.

postgresql-license.txt file for details.