December 9, 2004

Hi Jeremy,

We are planning to set up a meta-data management system here in CORMP to make our data more complete and more meaningful. I am wondering how meta-data are created in Caro-COOPS? Do you think Meta-DOOR is suitable for real-time data?

Xiaoyan

The Meta-Door system as it currently exists is designed as an extension of the previous Cast-Net system and currently only supports the import, creation and publishing of FGDC records by filling out the various web form pages. The current focus is on capturing some critical textual metadata related to keyword type searches. The upcoming versions of MetaDoor^? will focus on capturing platform and sensor metadata and providing representation of this metadata in SensorML^? and MarineXML^?.

The tricky part is the real-time data - there's so much of it compared to the general metadata which is static for the most part. Eventually we would like to be able to have tools within MetaDoor^? to help users initially create or map their tables to standard type(OGC, etc) URL service type requests for data. The OGC Publisher tool by DM Solutions is a similar in this way in that it is trying to map a data provider CSV file or mySQL database to a URL WFS request for data. But the best approach I believe for now is to continue to build tables organized by variable, time and location so that similarly organized queries are able to map to and retrieve this data easily whether it be a variable integration effort, a researcher request or another application.

So I'd look for Meta-Door to be able to help with organizing and mapping some of the additional metadata(FGDC, platform, sensor description) which is fairly static for now, but continue organizing your real-time data using the general 'by variable' table approach documented at http://twiki.sura.org/bin/view/Main/DataStandards#pointForm with the anticipation of having the data columns matched to URL query type requests in the future(from Meta-Door or otherwise).

CORMP can use the existing online production Meta-Door login at http://carocoops.org/metadoor (or http://nautilus.baruch.sc.edu/metadoor same site resolution) - if users had previous logins for Cast-Net, these should be the same for Meta-Door. I believe previous user records should also be available, but if not, MetaDoor^? can import FGDC records as well. You are welcome to set up your own instance of Meta-Door as well, let me or Rana know of problems you run into. The current schema diagram for the next version of Meta-Door is located here

-- JeremyCothran - 09 Dec 2004
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