Download Metacat

Documentation and Installation Instructions

• Metacat Administrator's Guide

Metacat is a flexible, open source metadata catalog and data repository that targets scientific data, particularly from ecology and environmental science. Metacat accepts XML as a common syntax for representing the large number of metadata content standards that are relevant to ecology and other sciences. Thus, Metacat is a generic XML database that allows storage, query, and retrieval of arbitrary XML documents without prior knowledge of the XML schema.

Metacat is being used extensively throughout the world to manage environmental data. It is a key infrastructure component for the NCEAS data catalog, the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) data catalog, and for the DataONE system, among others.