From tao at nceas.ucsb.edu  Tue Dec 11 11:57:20 2007
From: tao at nceas.ucsb.edu (Jing Tao)
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2007 11:57:20 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [eml-dev] Metacat 1.8.0 released by the Knowledge Network for
	Biocomplexity
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.63.0712111154340.1308@mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu>

The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) project
(http://knb.ecoinformatics.org) is pleased to announce its new release of
Metacat (1.8.0). 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 focuses on improving query performance. Both the selection
and access control queries were rewritten to execute efficiently.
To improve search performance, a query caching mechanism was introduced.
Cached queries are currently supported only for public users.

New Features:
* Data registries now support uploading of data objects along with data
   packages (Bug 1982)

Bug Fixes:
* Metacat Performace: Rewrite the xml_nodes queries (Bug 2155)
* Metacat Performace: Rewrite the xml_access part of the query (Bug 2557)
* Query cache mechanism (Bug 2905)
* Metacat Performance: updates from Morpho of data packages are taking
    longer than five minutes (Bug 2805)
* Metacat Performance: Optimize Postgres and Tomcat (Bug 2157)
* Metacat Performace: Upgrading hardware setup (Bug 2175)
* Metacat Performace: Add/drop indices on key columns (Bug 2153)
* Display of metadata documents reorganized, including a new citation
   format,obvious download options, and a redesigned data table layout 
(Bugs 2981,
   2832)
* I.E. display fixes on default skin (Bug 2579)
* Web Address links fixed (Bug 2147)
* NCEAS skin redesigned to use IFRAME-less layout, match new website.
* Spatial query:  data packages must be fully contained by the selection
   bounding box in order to appear in the search results (Bugs 2972, 2732).
* FGDC support: upload, delete, update, access control, and download
   (Bugs 2807, 2925, 2926, 2929, 2030).

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

