ncISO Facilitating Metadata and Scientific Data Discovery

Increasing the usability and availability climate and oceanographic datasets for environmental research requires improved metadata and tools to rapidly locate and access relevant information for an area of interest. Because of the distributed nature of most environmental geospatial data, a common approach is to use catalog services that support queries on metadata harvested from remote map and data services. A key component to effectively using these catalog services is the availability of high quality metadata associated with the underlying data sets. In this presentation, we examine the use of ncISO, and Geoportal as open source tools that can be used to document and facilitate access to ocean and climate data available from Thematic Realtime Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) data services. Many atmospheric and oceanographic spatial data sets are stored in the Network Common Data Format (netCDF) and served through the Unidata THREDDS Data Server (TDS). NetCDF and THREDDS are becoming increasingly accepted in both the scientific and geographic research communities as demonstrated by the recent adoption of netCDF as an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard. One important source for ocean and atmospheric based data sets is NOAA's Unified Access Framework (UAF) which serves over 3000 gridded data sets from across NOAA and NOAA-affiliated partners. Due to the large number of datasets, browsing the data holdings to locate data is impractical. Working with Unidata, we have created a new service for the TDS called "ncISO", which allows automatic generation of ISO 19115-2 metadata from attributes and variables in TDS datasets. The ncISO metadata records can be harvested by catalog services such as ESSI-labs GI-Cat catalog service, and ESRI's Geoportal which supports query through a number of services, including OpenSearch and Catalog Services for the Web (CSW). ESRI's Geoportal Server provides a number of user friendly search capabilities for end users, and links to data endpoints that can be used immediately in web-based mapping and analysis tools, as well as delivered to desktop applications.