Portal

Description
The World Data Center for Marine and Environmental Sciences (WDC-MARE) with its information system PANGAEA provides data portals for several EU projects (EUR-OCEANS, CARBOOCEAN) and will support existing metadata portals (e.g. GCMD) to disseminate its data/metadata for widespread use.

We also present a generic portal system architecture suitable for geoscientific data portals. The portals harvest data providers with Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocols using metadata in DIF or ISO-19139 format. Current implementations of OAI only support Dublin Core metadata. A new Java based portal software is in preparation and will support any XML format and makes them searchable through Apache Lucene without any other database software. The open architecture makes it possible to define searchable fields in several data formats by XPath allowing not only full text queries, even ranges are retrievable. The metadata of all providers are stored in separate indices which makes it possible to combine them in several different portals. The web service interface allows to support custom front-ends for users and additional visualization in maps. The software will be made freely available through the Open-Source concept.


 * Abstract (EGU 2006):
 * Preview of EGU 2006 slides: http://alpha.thetaphi.de/Schindler_EGU_2006.ppt
 * First portal implemented by this software: http://dataportal.carboocean.org/

The webservice supplied by the harvester/lucene software and used by the PHP applications in the data portals can be found at: http://ws.pangaea.de/portal-DIF/axis

For portals the suggest functionality will be included as already demonstrated in the CarboOceans portal. The user is supported in finding certain expressions when typing words to search for. Pangaea uses the open source software Yahoo YUI for this with AJAX as technique similar to the functionality first implement by Google suggest.

Portals served

 * Oceanography
 * CARBOOCEAN
 * EUR-OCEANS


 * Biodiversity
 * GBIF
 * OBIS
 * EurOBIS/MarBEF
 * SCAR-MarBIN

Portals planned

 * C3-Grid Portal
 * Paleodata, hosted by PAGES
 * SEDIS for IODP hosted in Sapporo and combining J-CORES, JANUS & PANGAEA
 * IPY in cooperation with NSIDC
 * Contribution of citable data sets to the GCMD

Metadata links
Metainformation in Pangaea should be kept at a necessary minimum but can be extended by using links. Most of the tables of the Pangaea data model provide an URL field to link to other pages or systems (or files), where a more detailed information can be found (e.g. Event, Method or Parameter). When linking to other web server or databases, if should be ensured, that the link remains stable. In any case it is recommended to link to one of the major global and stable(?) systems like
 * Wikipedia
 * Mindat
 * ITIS
 * Species 2000