Mercury - Distributed Metadata Management, Data Discovery and Access System

Bruce E. Wilson, Manager, ORNL DAAC for Biogeochemical Dynamics, Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory., wilsonbe@ornl.gov (Presenting)

Mercury is a Metadata Harvesting, Search and Retrieval tool based on both open source and ORNL-developed software, with continuing development funded by a consortium of projects. Mercury supports various metadata standards including XML, Z39.50, FGDC, Dublin-Core, Darwin-Core, EML, and ISO-19115 (under development). Mercury provides a single portal to information contained in disparate data management systems. It collects metadata and key data from contributing project servers distributed around the world and builds a centralized index. The Mercury search interfaces then allow the users to perform fielded, spatial and temporal searches across these metadata sources. This centralized repository of metadata with distributed data sources allows data providers to advertise the availability of their data while maintaining complete control and ownership of that data, if desired. The new Mercury system is based on a Service Oriented Architecture and supports various services such as Thesaurus Service, Gazetteer Web Service, RSS, Geo-RSS, Web Services and Portlets. Other features include: Filtering and dynamic sorting of search results, book-markable search results, save, retrieve, and modify search criteria. http://mercury.ornl.gov/ornldaac/