Ocean_use_case_searching

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This is a summary of a design to provide EML documents for the data sets that are part of the REAP Ocean Use Case. The complete design can be found at REAP Cataloging and Searching . Note that the software described there makes use of two other components proposed to be developed for not only this effort but also for other projects. Those are the NcML AIS handler and the NcML Aggregation handler, both modules that will run in Hyrax.

Summary

The Problem

DAP servers, which provide all of the data used by the Ocean Use Case are completely autonomous entities with their own network interfaces. Each supports a uniform base set of operations, but there is no requirement to organize or catalog those servers in a coordinated and centralized way. For the purposes of this use case, we assume that implementing a distributed query is outside the scope of solutions we wan to consider. Thus, we must create a centralized store of information about the collection of known data sets that can be searched in response to various types of queries.

Solution

The Kepler client supports searching the Metacat data base system to locate data sets and it seems that populating an instance of this data base with information about the data sets in the use case will provide the needed information on which to build a search user interface. However, the metacat/kepler combination is not completely general; while metacat is capable of indexing arbitrary XML documents (so it could index the DDX returned by a DAP server for a given data set), kepler expects the records it searches to be (a subset of) EML documents.

Risks

20040103-NCDC-L4LRblend-GLOB-v01-fv01_0-AVHRR_AMSR_OI.nc.bz2.eml

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