[ecoinfo] new software releases for Morpho and Metacat

[Matt Jones]

The development team for the NSF-sponsored Knowledge Network for 
Biocomplexity project  has released new versions of their open-source 
data management software for ecology.  The Morpho 1.1.0 and Metacat 
1.1.0 releases include bug fixes and some new features in each of the 
packages.  See the README in the releases for more details.

Morpho is a data management application for managing ecological data. 
Morpho allows researchers to describe their data using a comprehensive 
and flexible metadata specification, and to share their data publicly or 
to specific collaborators over the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity 
system. It works fully on Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and other platforms 
(untested).

Metacat is a flexible metadata catalog for metadata and data.  It 
implements a database storage system for XML formatted documents and 
allows storage metadata and data with arbitrary schemas. Thus it 
supports a wide variety of metadata standards.  Metacat supports several 
databases on the back-end, including Oracle, PostgeSQL and SQL Server, 
and has been run on various Linux, UNIX, and Windows platforms. The 
server supports document storage, retrievel, query, validation, and 
transformation into HTML (using the XSLT stylesheet language).  In 
addition, there is a mechanism for replicating the database to other 
metacat instances for backup and load balancing purposes.  Metacat 
currently uses an LDAP database for authenticating users, but was 
written to accomodate other authentication services as well.

Metacat is currently being used to implement the KNB network, the 
Organization of Biological Field Stations Data Registry, the UC Natural 
Reserve System Data Registry, and the MARINE Data Registry.

Both software packages are freely available (including source code) from 
the KNB website:
    http://knb.ecoinformatics.org
under the "Software" section of the site.

We welcome participation in the design and development of these packages 
(see the KNB web site for details).

Matt

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Matt Jones                                    jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
Got data?  Need data? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science 
Foundation under Grant Nos. DEB99-80154 and DBI99-04777. Any opinions, 
findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material 
are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of 
the National Science Foundation (NSF).