<!DOCTYPE html PUBliC "-//W3C//DTD html 4.0//EN"> <html> <head> <title>KNB Software Development Guide: Metacat</title> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="./default.css"> </head> <body> <p> </p> <table class="tabledefault" width="100%"> <tr> <td class="tablehead" colspan="2"><p class="label">Metacat Development Guide</p></td> </tr> <tr> <td> <p>Metacat is a flexible metadata database. It utilizes <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml" target="offline">XML</a> as a common syntax for representing the large number of metadata content standards that are relevant to ecology. Thus, Metacat is a generic XML database that allows storage, query, and retrieval of arbitrary XML documents without prior knowledge of the XML schema. For a user level overview of Metacat, please visit the <a href="../user/metacattour.html">Metacat Tour</a> documentation. </p> <p> The Metacat database models XML documents as a DOM tree, basically decomposing the nodes of the XML document and storing the node data as a series of records in a relational database via a JDBC connection. At this point, only Oracle and PostgreSQL have been tested as a back end databases, but we have avoided RDBMS specific features in order to maintain portability to other relational databases. </p> </td> </tr> <tr><td> </td></tr> <tr> <td>The pages below provide more detailed descriptions of the various development and architecture subjects involved in Metacat. <ul> <li> <a href="./metacat-architecture.html">Metacat Architecture </a></li> <li> <!-- a href="./metacat-dev-hardware.html" -->Metacat developement hardware requirements <!-- /a --></li> <li> <a href="./metacat-eclipse-project.html">Setting up a Metacat Eclipse project </a></li> <li> <a href="./building-metacat.html">Building Metacat</a></li> <li> <a href="./testing-metacat.html">Testing Metacat</a></li> <li> <a href="./troubleshooting.html">Troubleshooting Metacat</a></li> </ul> </td> </tr> <tr><td> </td></tr> </table> <p class="contact"> Web Contact: <a href="mailto:jones@nceas.ucsb.edu">jones@nceas.ucsb.edu</A> </p> </body> </html>