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="./default.css">
7
</head>
8

    
9
<body>
10

    
11
<table class="tabledefault" width="100%">
12
<tr>
13
  <td rowspan="2"><img src="./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="/" class="toollink"> KNB Home </a></td>
18
  <td><a href="/data.html" class="toollink"> Data </a></td>
19
  <td><a href="/people.html" class="toollink"> People </a></td>
20
  <td><a href="/informatics" class="toollink"> Informatics </a></td>
21
  <td><a href="/biodiversity" class="toollink"> Biocomplexity </a></td>
22
  <td><a href="/education" class="toollink"> Education </a></td>
23
  <td><a href="/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="/software/download.html">Download Metacat</a></p>
37
  <h3>Installation Instructions</h3>
38
  <ul>
39
    <li><a href="./metacat-linux-install.html">Linux Installation Instructions</a></li>
40
    <li><a href="./metacat-windows-install.html">Windows Installation Instructions</a></li>
41
  </ul>
42
  
43
  <p>Metacat is a flexible metadata database. It utilizes 
44
     <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml" target="offline">XML</a> as a 
45
     common syntax for representing the large number of metadata content
46
     standards that are relevant to ecology.  Thus, Metacat is a generic XML
47
     database that allows storage, query, and retrieval of arbitrary XML 
48
     documents without prior knowledge of the XML schema.
49
  </p>
50
  <p>
51
     The Metacat database models XML documents as a DOM tree, basically 
52
     decomposing the nodes of the XML document and storing the node data
53
     as a series of records in a relational database via a JDBC connection.
54
     At this point, only Oracle and PostgreSQL have been tested as a backend databases, but
55
     we have avoided RDBMS specific features in order to maintain portability
56
     to other relational databases.
57
  </p>
58
  <p>
59
     Metacat is implemented as a Java Servlet, and so communicates using basic
60
     HTTP protocol semantics.  The figure below shows the basic structure of
61
     the Metacat architecture. A well defined interface for inserting, 
62
     updating, deleting, querying, and transforming (using XSL) XML documents
63
     is presented.  We would like to add the DOM API as an alternative 
64
     supported mechanism for interacting with Metacat, but have not yet
65
     implemented this functionality.
66
  </p>
67
  <p><img src="./metacat.gif" /></p>
68
  </td>
69
</tr>
70
<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
71

    
72
<tr>
73
  <td>The pages below provide more detailed descriptions of the 
74
      various components of the Metacat Servlet. Take the Metacat Tour for 
75
      a detailed look at the algorithms and implementation of Metacat.
76

    
77
    <ul>
78
      <li> <a href="./metacattour.html">A Tour of Metacat</a></li>
79
      <li> <a href="./dev/api/index.html" target="offline">Javadoc API 
80
           Documentation</a></li>
81
      <li> <a href="./troubleshooting.html">Metacat Troubleshooting Guide</a></li>
82
    </ul>
83
  </td>
84
</tr>
85
<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
86

    
87
</table>
88

    
89
<p class="contact">
90
Web Contact: <a href="mailto:jones@nceas.ucsb.edu">jones@nceas.ucsb.edu</A>
91
</p>
92
</body>
93
</html>
(19-19/63)