The NOAA Data Set Catalog

Darin M. McKeever
Anne O'Donnell
George Saxton

NOAA Environmental Information Services
SSMC-3
1315 East West Highway
Silver Spring, Maryland, USA  20910

The NOAA Data Set Catalog is a distributed, multi-format database
system that allows users to search for publicly available environmental data
held by public and private sources throughout the world.  The National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Environmental Information Services
division provides this service in partial fulfillment of NOAA's
responsibility to archive and document environmental data.  A hierarchical
system of environmental metadata, databases, HTML forms, and CGI scripts,
the NOAA Data Set Catalog represents a new approach to the storage,
collection, and presentation of environmental data, and an important step in
at least three areas of data access: (1) Decentralization of Metadata
Holdings through distributed WAIS databases allows NOAA to store metadata at
the data provider's site; (2) Support for Multiple Metadata Formats by
mapping common fields allows effective search of DIF, NEDRES, FGDC, and GILS
formats, with presentation of results in the user's preferred format; and
(3) More Direct Access to the Data From The Metadata using on-the-fly
conversion to hypertext.