Submitting Data and Metadata to the Catalog

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.
 
 

Insertion of Individual Structured Metadata Documents

The dialog for inserting individual metadata documents is shown below. One can insert a document directly from the Metadata Editor or a file on the local computer that has been created with any XML editing tool (Note the 'Current Doc' or 'Select File' choices.) Note that it is usually best to let the server determine a unique ID number for each XML document submitted (i.e select the 'Server' radio button as indicated.) The ID will be displayed if the insertion is successful.


 

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'.
 

Insertion of Data and the Automatic Creation of Resource, File, and Package Metadata

    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.