[ecoinfo] Metacat 1.7.0 released by the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity

[Jing Tao]

The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) project 
(http://knb.ecoinformatics.org) is pleased to announce its new release of 
Metacat (1.7.0). Metacat is a flexible database storage system for XML 
formatted documents. The new release of Metacat can be downloaded from:

http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/software/download.html#metacat

This release features only a few minor changes to the core Metacat engine.
The major focus of this release is the addition of the spatial functionality.
The geographic coverage of metadata documents can now be cached in a GIS-
accessible format and published via web mapping services and an online
interactive map.

New Features:
* Three new open source libraries have been integrated with Metacat:
   - Geoserver:  A standards-compliant web map server to publish
                 geographic data to the web.
                 (http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Home)
   - GeoTools:   A java-based GIS toolkit to programatically
                 manipulate spatial datasets.
                 (http://geotools.codehaus.org/)
   - Mapbuilder: A javascript application to provide an interactive
                 web map front-end to Geoserver.
                 (http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAP/Home)
* Spatial Caching/Indexing mechanism; documents with geographic
   coverages will be added to the spatial cache.
* Spatial Query action in metacat servlet.
* Interactive Web map to visualize and query the spatial
   distribution of metadata documents.
* Experimental python, ruby and php client libraries to interface with
   metacat.
* Preliminary process in place for web based configuration of metacat.

Compatibility Notices:
*Tomcat 3 and 4 are no longer tested or supported. Users are
   highly encouraged to upgrade to Tomcat 5.5

Bug Fixes:
* Metacat administrators are able to modify and delete documents
   created by other users.
* Fixed problems with indexing XML attributes, see bug 2469
* Fixed problem that uploading a XML documents which contains "infinity"
   word will cause an error message "Column infinity does not exist", see
   bug 2675
* Fixed problem that Advanced Search page didn't work in java
   1.5/tomcat 5.5

We hope that this software is useful to you. We welcome feedback and
comments that will make the application more useful in the future. Please
submit bugs and problems through our bug tracking system
(http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org) and send general feedback to
'metacat-dev at ecoinformatics.org'.

The Metacat Development Team
Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity Project


Jing Tao
National Center for Ecological
Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
735 State St. Suite 204
Santa Barbara, CA 93101