HR: 0800h
AN: SF21A-0020    [Abstracts]
TI: GCMD Portals for Focused Access to Earth and Climate Data
AU: * Weir, H M
EM: hweir@gcmd.nasa.gov
AF: Science Systems & Applications, Inc., 10210 Greenbelt Road Suite 500, Lanham, MD 20706
AU: Leicester, S M
EM: sleicest@gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov
AF: Science Systems & Applications, Inc., 10210 Greenbelt Road Suite 500, Lanham, MD 20706
AB: Are you finding the data you need? Are you overwhelmed by too much data and not enough direction as to what is the right data for you? Is Google still not getting you to the data? With recent movies portraying climate change disasters, scientists need to be able to easily find available Earth, solar and climate data. Locating the vast amount of Earth science data and tools available today, can be difficult for users. NASA's Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) has a diverse collection of metadata describing data and tools from the Earth's core to solar interactions and their influences on climate and life. With over 15,000 metadata records in the GCMD database users may still feel the task of finding the right data daunting. The GCMD has a solution: customized access to subsets of the database content through "portals". Portals are a virtual subsets of the metadata found in the GCMD, which allow users to view smaller, related groups of metadata. Some portals are representative of a specific scientific community or project, such as the Antarctic Master Directory (AMD), which represents an international collaboration conducting scientific research in Antarctica. Users looking specifically for models or model output data may find the Model portal useful. Other portals such as the Sun-Earth Interaction portal, are based on an Earth science theme related to Sun's activity affects the Earth's environment. Portals have made it easier for organizations to maintain and document their data in one place without duplicating the effort to create another online directory.
UR: http://gcmd.nasa.gov
DE: 9805 Instruments useful in three or more fields
DE: 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields
DE: 1600 GLOBAL CHANGE (New category)
SC: Special Focus: Advances in Data Acquisition, Management, Analysis and Display [SF]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting