HR: 16:00h
AN: SA54A-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: Data and Metadata Standards: Lessons Learned From the Madrigal/Cedar Databases
AU: * Rideout, W
EM: brideout@haystack.mit.edu
AF: MIT Haystack Observatory, Route 40, Westford, MA 01886
AU: Holt, J
EM: jmh@haystack.mit.edu
AF: MIT Haystack Observatory, Route 40, Westford, MA 01886
AB: The Madrigal/Cedar databases have served the atmospheric science communities since the 1980's as early examples of virtual observatories. The keystones of these databases are the Cedar database standard and the Madrigal metadata standard. The Cedar database standard defines several thousand parameters that can be measured, and was developed as a community-wide effort in the 1980's. The Madrigal metadata standard was developed to allow the many separate Madrigal database installations to share high-level information about what data they store, allowing a user to access any individual Madrigal database as if it contained all the data in all the Madrigal databases. This talk will focus on the lessons learned from these data and metadata standards. Even these simple standards have allowed the Madrigal database to contain a powerful engine that allows it to derive many parameters beyond those measured, allowing complex searches across the entire database. The various ways these standards could be improved will also be discussed. A fundamental lesson is that the up-front development of data and metadata standards make virtual observatories both far easier to develop, and far more functional.
DE: 2447 Modeling and forecasting
SC: SPA-Aeronomy [SA]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting