Metacat

Metacat: Metadata and Data Management System

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Metacat is a repository for data and metadata (data about data), which helps scientists find, understand and effectively use the data sets they manage or that have been created by others. Thousands of data sets are currently documented in a standardized way and stored in Metacat systems, providing the scientific community with a broad range of ecological data that--because the data are well and consistently described--can be easily searched, compared, merged, or used in other ways.

Not only is the Metacat repository a reliable place to store metadata and data (the database is replicated over a secure connection so that every record is stored on multiple machines and no data is ever lost to technical failures), it provides a user-friendly interface for information entry and retrieval. Scientists can search the repository via the Web using a customizable search form. Searches return results based on user-specified criteria, such as desired geographic coverage, taxonomic coverage, and/or keywords that appear in places such as the data set's title or owner's name. Users need only click a linked search result to open the corresponding data-set documentation in a browser window and discover whom to contact to obtain the data themselves (or how to immediately download the data via the Web).

Metacat is a Java servlet application that runs on Window or Linux platforms in conjunction with a database, such as PostgreSQL (or Oracle 8i), and a Web server. The Metacat application stores data in an XML format using Ecological Metadata Language (EML) or another ecological metadata standard. For more information about Metacat or for examples of projects currently using Metacat, please see http://knb.ecoinformatics.org.

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   development.txt

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