IUGONET Metadata Database
Access to the observational data through metadata
Current issue for using the observational data
In the past, the databases of observations for upper atmosphere have been maintained and made available to the community by each institution that conducted the observations. However, for general user except for the researcher who is actually related to the observation and specialist of the field, it is difficult to discover and access the data due to lack of information of them.
Solution
For solving this issue, IUGONET will create metadata of the ground-based observational data in our project and build the database system for handling them, which is called IUGONET Metadata Database (IUGONET-MDB). It provides the service for cross-searching observational data distributed across the IUGONET institutions. Users will be able to easily access the data by using search results of the metadata because the metadata include location information of the observational data. In a word, the IUGONET-MDB serves as a broker of ground-based observational data for the upper atmosphere. We hope that the IUGONET-MDB bring a remarkable advancement in accessibility to the observational data and accelerate the interdisciplinary study.
Back-end of the IUGONET Metadata Database
We adopted DSpace (*) as the IUGONET-MDB platform because there are so many case examples in Japanese academic information repositories. It has fundamental functions of registering, retrieving, providing and harvesting of the metadata which is written in the IUGONET common metadata format. Users will be able to access the IUGONET-MDB by using any browsers and get some metadata.
* It is a kind of repository software. It manages the digital contents and their metadata.
The beta version of the IUGONE-MDB was released in April, 2011 with some metadata in the release plan. The other metadata will be registered to the MDB one by one after that. In addition, we are discussing possible cooperation with the data providers who are interested in registering their metadata into the IUGONET-MDB.
