Morpho
User Guide
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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:

  • Create and Edit Metadata
  • Search and Query Metadata Collections
  • View Data and Data Collections
  • Verify/Edit Data
  • Provide Access Control

Open architecture features include the following:

  • Cross-Platform Graphical Interface
    • Uses Java ‘Swing’ components
    • Same code works on Windows, Linux, Mac systems
  • Uses Web Standard Communication Protocols
    • Uses HTTP protocols to communicate with standard servlet based web server
  •  XML data encoding used for information transfer
  •  Use of XML/XPath
    • XPath searches used for searching local XML documents (avoids need for local relational database)
  • XPath queries sent to network catalog for searches