The NOAAServer project is a geographically distributed data access and retrieval system on the World Wide Web, sponsored by NOAA's ESDIM Program Office. The purpose of NOAAServer is to make NOAA's vast environmental data and information resources more widely and easily accessible to other researchers and to the general public. NOAAServer is currently composed of some fourteen data-serving nodes, with at least one node within each of the five NOAA Line Offices (NMFS, NWS, NESDIS, NOS, and OAR). The ability to use NOAAServer to search for data across the whole organization is a key benefit of the technology.
Creation of a NOAAServer node normally entails the creation of Web page templates, compilation of FGDC-compliant metadata, and registration of a set of URLs for each data set to be provided. The URLs point to three end-user "services" associated with each data set: information, preview, and obtain. For NOAA's three National Data Centers (NCDC, NGDC, and NODC) and many smaller Centers of Data, including the Climate Diagnostics Center, the number of data sets to be served justifies the creation of a separate NOAAServer node. However, for smaller-scale data providers, the task of creating a new NOAAServer node, although not difficult, may seem intimidating due to their lack of experience with this technology.
The NOAA Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), which includes the Sea Grant Program, the National Undersea Research Program, and the twelve Environmental Research Laboratories, has developed a coordinated NOAAServer node to address the issue of including data sets from OAR research groups or individuals that do not have ready access to a local NOAAServer node. The idea is to prevent a lack of in-house computer systems expertise from standing in the way of making data available to other researchers and the public.
The goal of simplifying the process of participating in NOAAServer by using the OAR coordinated NOAAServer node is accomplished by taking advantage of the distributed nature of the Web. To be included in the coordinated node, a data provider must first build FGDC metadata descriptions of the data they want served. Special metadata tags are then inserted into the metadata which contain URL's that point to whatever services the provider may have already created to distribute the data. These URL's could be as simple as an address and phone number or an anonymous FTP site or as complex as a Web-based service to plot or create subsets of the data.
Once the FGDC metadata has been created, it is grouped with all of the other metadata descriptions for the OAR coordinated node. These descriptions are then collected and indexed just like those of any single data provider that is participating as a regular NOAAServer node. Each of the information, preview and obtain services provided by NOAAServer sites is introduced to the user via a standard Web page. Each site uses templates provided by the NOAAServer development team to create a page to introduce each of these services so that the look-and-feel of the NOAAServer site is consistent. A standard page to introduce one of these services contains a banner, a link or links to the actual service being introduced and a standard footer. The OAR site further simplifies the task joining NOAAServer by creating a set of these introductory pages for the OAR coordinated node. All of the individual participants in the coordinated node use these same pages and the links to the actual services at the local sites are automatically integrated into the introduction pages by the software for the coordinated node.