The Distributed Noaa Environmental Services Data Directory

Gerald S. Barton
NOAA Environmental Information Services
SSMC-3  15448
Silver Spring, MD  20910
301-713-0572
Fax: 301-713-1249
barton@esdim.noaa.gov

The NOAA Environmental Services Data Directory has existed since 1989 as
a centrally operated and maintained system.  In late 1994 we began to
distribute parts of the NOAA Directory to responsible organizations in
NOAA.

The technical feasibility of distributing parts of the directory
and accessing them as a single unit was accomplished with a pilot
implementation in the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) that
installed all of the NODC data descriptions on a NODC Unix server.
Interface to the distributed Directory is via the capabilities of the
World Wide Web (WWW).  Also implemented was the capability to access data 
descriptions in other formats.  The NOAA National Environmental  
Data Referral Service (NEDRES) data base was used.  It has a format similar 
to the Directory Interchange Format (DIF) and its operation dates back to 
the mid 1970 period.

The NOAA Data Catalog section on the NOAA Data Management WWW pages allow
the user to search the distributed parts of the NOAA Directory and also to
search the NEDRES directory from the same search query.  The query can
search specific fields such as the Data Holder of the selected data
directories.  A list of titles results and the user may view the
description in several formats including the original format, DIF, FGDC,
GILS, and a generic format.

Implementation plans for the distributed NOAA Directory focus
on the three NOAA Data Centers in 1995 with other NOAA Centers of Data being
added in the future.