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Metacat.pm -- perl client to the Metacat XML database
-----------------------------------------------------

Version: 0.0 Alpha 1 Release

Feedback and bugs to: knb-software@nceas.ucsb.edu

Contributors: Matt Jones (jones@nceas.ucsb.edu)
              Chris Jones (cjones@lifesci.ucsb.edu)

This is a Metacat Client library that allows access to Metacat, a flexible 
database storage system for XML formatted documents. The client library
provides facilities for inserting, updating, and deleting XML documents
from metacat, as well as querying metacat using the Metacat pathquery 
query syntax.

INSTALLATION
------------
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

If you want the tests to work, you'll need to edit the metacatUrl, username,
and password parameters in the test script and set them to real values for
a working Metacat database.

USAGE
-----
Use "perldoc Metacat" after installation for detailed documentation.

Details of the Metacat architecture can be found on the website for 
the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB):

  http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/software/metacat.html

Contributions to this work are welcome.  Please see the above web site
for details on how to contribute.

This software is copyrighted by The Regents of the University of California
and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
and licensed under the GNU GPL; see the 'LICENSE' file for
details.

This material is based upon work supported by the 
National Science Foundation under Grant No. DEB99-80154 and DBI99-04777.
Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect 
the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).