Introduction
MORPHO is a tool for data management by the ecologist.. The basic goal
of development effort was to create an easy-to-use, cross-platform application
for accessing and manipulating metadata and data (both locally and on remote
servers). MORPHO is thus a client for a networked-based catalog of ecological
data and the metadata describing this data. It is also a stand-alone application
which can work with local data and metadata in the same way as server-based
information.
The basic operations that can be carried out using MORPHO are:
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Create and Edit Metadata
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Search and Query Metadata Collections
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View Data and Data Collections
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Verify/Edit Data
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Transform Metadata
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Provide Access Control
Open architecture features include the following:
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Cross-Platform Graphical Interface
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Uses Java ‘Swing’ components
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Same code works on Windows, Linux, Mac systems
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Uses Web Standard Communication Protocols
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Uses HTTP protocols to communicate with standard servlet based web server
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XML data encoding used for information transfer
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Use of XML/XPath
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XPath searches used for searching local XML documents
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(avoids need for local relational database)
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XPath queries sent to network catalog for searches
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Uses XSLT to transform & format results