Portals of Discovery: Customized Gateways to Discovering Earth Science Data

Co-authors: Lola Olsen, Gene Major, Dave Kendig, NASA/GCMD

Portals Of Discovery: Customized Gateways to Discovering Earth Science Data

The Global Change Master (GCMD), http: //gcmd.nasa.gov, is a project designed to assist scientists in locating Earth Science data sets. The GCMD is a service providing over 8000 data set descriptions of atmospheric, oceanographic, geologic, geographic, ecological, and socioeconomic data holdings from around the world. A recent feature developed by the GCMD uses enhanced software to allow users to search a virtual collection or portal of Earth Science metadata records customized for a particular project or discipline. Portals have been developed for the agricultural, Antarctic, forest, and oceanographic communities, as well as for international global observing programs and for NASA's Federation of Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP). Enhanced software techniques have made it possible to extract controlled keywords and make them searchable, thus providing a complete search and retrieval system for the discovery of project-specific data.