At a recent meeting, DEAL members investigated data cataloguing strategies for the UK’s national data repository. As for earlier e-business initiatives, two strategies have emerged. Either the hub (DEAL) does the cataloging (a lot of work, but likely to produce a good catalog) or the vendors catalog their own data – and DEAL develops a mechanism to ‘expose’ catalog information to researchers.
CCLRC
A possible DEAL analog, the CCLRC provides an portal to UK scientific data. Access to disparate legacy data sources at the different R&D facilities is enabled by XML ‘wrappers’ around local metadata catalogues. The CCLRC also exposes its data through the SDSC Storage Resource Broker (SRB) developed in the ’90’s at the University of San Diego. Some 200TB of data are shared through the SRB between 30 participating US Universities.
Oil Cos.
DEAL’s philosophy is to let data owners expose their data through their websites. But these offer DEAL users a wide variety of user ‘experiences’ which need standardizing. Portal technology will be available in DEAL ‘real soon now.’
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