There are two distinct methods for submitting information to the centralized catalog. Understanding these methods requires and understanding of the use of structured metadata (XML files) and data in Morpho.
First of all, a data item is any electronic document the user
has created to store information about a project. This might be a text
file, an Excel spreadsheet, a SAS document. etc. Structured metadata is
data about such a data document stored in XML format (e.g. EML documents).
Structured metadata is needed for the central catalog system to find data
documents of interest to the researcher.
After inserting a number of individual metadata documents, the user
may need to create a "package" document which contains a set of relations
which combine metadata and data into a 'dataset'.
Basically, the user simply creates a datafile using
whatever tools they want. That data file is selected in the above dialog
box. 'Eml-file' and 'resource' metadata documents will be created automatically
and associated with the data file
using a 'package' xml document. The above figure shows the screen prior
to clicking the "Submit" button. Templates are
used to create mostly empty metadata files (if the user does not change
the references in the text boxes). I have added a
few fields that the user can fill out to provide information (e.g.
Originator and Keywords) that the user can fill out; the
data is then added to the metadata templates. [Note that for maximum
usefulness the user will need to edit the metadata
files later and add more information.]
When the "Submit" button is clicked, the data is
sent to the server and the metadata files are created and also inserted
into the central catalog. A sample screen is shown below. Note that
the URL of the inserted data document is shown
along with metadata IDs. Note that this approach makes is very easy
to put data into the KNB system and immediately
be able to access this centralized data by a few of the metadata attributes.