Tuesday, 11 February 2003: 11:30 AM
A Web-Based Scientific Data And Information Super Server With A Flexible XML Metadata Support
In the information age and with explosively increasing volumes of
remote sensing, model and other Earth Science data available,
scientists, including meteorologists, are now facing challenges to
find and to access interesting data sets effectively and efficiently
through the Internet. Metadata have been recognized as a key
technology to ease the search and retrieval of Earth science, NWP and
other meteorological data. In this paper, we first discuss the
DIstributed MEtadata Server (DIMES) prototype system. Designed to be
flexible yet simple, DIMES uses XML to represent, store, retrieve and
interoperate metadata in a distributed environment. DIMES accepts
metadata in any well-formed XML format and thus assumes the "tree"
semantics of metadata entries. In addition to regular metadata
search, DIMES provides a web-based metadata navigation interface by
using the "nearest neighbor search." We also discuss a system
designed to integrate an existing data access and analysis server,
namely the GrADS/DODS server, and the DIMES to form a Scientific Data
Information Super Server (SDISS), which supports both metadata and
data. The SDISS guarantees the consistency between the content of
the data server and the content of the metadata server.
Supplementary URL: http://spring.scs.gmu.edu:8199/servlet/SiesipDataTree