Metadata-Centric Discovery Service

It is data about data. It is the information describing a picture without looking at the picture. Through the years, the Earth Science community seeks better methods to describe science artifacts to improve the quality and efficiency in information exchange. One the purposes are to provide information to the users to guide them into identifies the science artifacts of their interest. The NASA Distributed Active Archive Centers (DAACs) are the building blocks of a data centric federation, designed for processing and archiving from NASA's Earth Observation missions and their distribution as well as provision of specialized services to users. The Physical Oceanography Distributed Active Archive Center (PO.DAAC), at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, archives and distributes science artifacts pertain to the physical state of the ocean. As part of its high-performance operational Data Management and Archive System (DMAS) is a fast data discovery RESTful web service called the Oceanographic Common Search Interface (OCSI). The web service searches and delivers metadata on all data holdings within PO.DAAC. Currently OCSI supports metadata standards such as ISO-19115, OpenSearch, GCMD, and FGDC, with new metadata standards still being added. While we continue to seek the silver bullet in metadata standard, the Earth Science community is in fact consists of various standards due to the specific needs of its users and systems. This presentation focuses on the architecture behind OCSI as a reference implementation on building a metadata-centric discovery service.