The NERC Data Grid (NDG) provides the infrastructure which allows users to:
- Find data
- Explore what is known about datasets
- Access, manipulate and visualise data!
Like the web, the NDG has no “owner” or “central control”; data remain with data providers - be they managed data centres in the UK or abroad, or semi-managed data archives in large research groups. The location of the data can be transparent to the user, while still allowing data providers to maintain their intellectual investment by controlling access.
The NDG team provide two community services which all NDG participants may avail themselves of:
- The “NDG Discovery Service”: A database of discovery information, harvested from data providers around the world, together with a portal web-site and a set of web-services, for exploiting that database.
- The “NDG Vocabulary Service”: Databases of environmental thesauri and ontology tools to map between terms
