Mercury Toolset for Spatiotemporal Metadata

Mercury (http://mercury.ornl.gov) is a set of tools for federated harvesting, searching, and retrieving metadata, particularly spatiotemporal metadata. Version 3.0 of the Mercury toolset provides orders of magnitude improvements in search speed, support for additional metadata formats, integration with Google Maps for spatial queries, facetted type search, support for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) delivery of search results, and enhanced customization to meet the needs of the multiple projects that use Mercury. It provides a single portal to very quickly search for data and information contained in disparate data management systems, each of which may use different metadata formats. Mercury harvests metadata and key data from contributing project servers distributed around the world and builds a centralized index. The search interfaces then allow the users to perform a variety of fielded, spatial, and temporal searches across these metadata sources. This centralized repository of metadata with distributed data sources provides extremely fast search results to the user, while allowing data providers to advertise the availability of their data and maintain complete control and ownership of that data. Mercury periodically (typically daily) harvests metadata sources through a collection of interfaces and re-indexes these metadata to provide extremely rapid search capabilities, even over collections with tens of millions of metadata records. A number of both graphical and application interfaces have been constructed within Mercury, to enable both human users and other computer programs to perform queries. Mercury was also designed to support multiple different projects, so that the particular fields that can be queried and used with search filters are easy to configure for each different project

Archiving Numerical Models of Biogeochemical Dynamics

No adequate community-wide mechanism or set of standards currently exists to ensure the long-term reproducibility of results from numerical modeling in biogeochemical research. Various investigators maintain copies of code and supporting materials through ad hoc methods, and some models and modeling studies are not archived by any mechanism other than the published manuscripts describing specific research results. This state of affairs invites trouble. To illustrate this situation, one of the authors of this article was recently involved in producing a state-of-the-art review on the topic of the effects of climate change on forests. The literature on this topic contains a rich array of results from dynamic models of global or regional vegetation produced by forcing these models with climate change scenarios