Metacat Administrator’s Guide

Version: 2.15.1

Send feedback and bugs to:

• metacat-dev@ecoinformatics.org
• http://bugzilla.ecoinformatics.org

License: GPL

Release Date: September, 2021

Metacat is a repository for data and metadata (documentation about data) that helps scientists find, understand and effectively use data sets they manage or that have been created by others. Thousands of data sets are currently documented in a standardized way and stored in Metacat systems, providing the scientific community with a broad range of science data that–because the data are well and consistently described–can be easily searched, compared, merged, or used in other ways.

Note:

An external Solr HTTP server is required as of Metacat version 2.13.0. You should add the tomcat8 user to the solr group and the solr user to the tomcat8 group in order to avoid the file permission issues. The details can be found on the Solr Server part of the installation page.

If this is the first time you have installed an external Solr server, you need to re-index all existing objects in the Metacat instance. The instruction can be found on the Regenerating The Index part of the Metacat indexing page.

• Download Metacat

  • Binary Distribution (A war file installation)

    • GZIP File: metacat-bin-2.15.1.tar.gz
    • ZIP File: metacat-bin-2.15.1.zip

  • Source Distribution (Full source, requiring build)

    • GZIP File: metacat-src-2.15.1.tar.gz
    • ZIP File: metacat-src-2.15.1.zip

  • Older versions

• For Developers: Metacat API documentation

Contents

• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1. What’s in this Guide
  • 1.2. Metacat Features
• 2. Contributors
  • 2.1. Contributors
  • 2.2. Patch contributors
• 3. License
• 4. Downloading and Installing Metacat
  • 4.1. System Requirements
  • 4.2. Installing on Linux
• 5. Configuring Metacat
  • 5.1. Initial Configuration
  • 5.2. Logging in to Metacat
  • 5.3. Required Configuration
  • 5.4. Additional Configuration
• 6. DataONE Member Node Support
  • 6.1. What is DataONE?
  • 6.2. The DataONE Service Interface
  • 6.3. Member Nodes
  • 6.4. Coordinating Nodes
  • 6.5. Investigator Toolkit
  • 6.6. Configuring Metacat as a Member Node
  • 6.7. Access Control Policies
  • 6.8. Configuration as a replication target
  • 6.9. Object Replication Policies
  • 6.10. Generating DataONE System Metadata
  • 6.11. Apache configuration details
  • 6.12. Configure Tomcat to allow DataONE identifiers
• 7. Accessing and Submitting Metadata and Data
  • 7.1. A Brief Note about How Information is Stored
  • 7.2. Using the Registry
  • 7.3. Using HTML Forms (the HTTP Interface)
  • 7.4. Using the EarthGrid API (aka EcoGrid)
  • 7.5. Using Morpho
  • 7.6. Creating Your Own Client
• 8. Metacat Indexing
  • 8.1. Indexed documents and fields
  • 8.2. Default indexed fields
  • 8.3. Index configuration
  • 8.4. Adding additional document types and fields
  • 8.5. Querying the index
  • 8.6. Access Policy enforcement
  • 8.7. Regenerating the index
  • 8.8. Class design overview
• 9. Modifying and Creating Themes
  • 9.1. Quick Start Using the Default Theme
  • 9.2. Creating a Custom Theme
  • 9.3. Using Custom Endpoints
  • 9.4. Creating a Custom Skin
• 10. Metacat Authentication Mechanism
  • 10.1. File-Based Authentication
  • 10.2. Utility for Password File Based Authentication
  • 10.3. LDAP-Based Authentication
• 11. Metacat’s Use of Geoserver
  • 11.1. Installing and Configuring
  • 11.2. Spatial Queries
• 12. Replication
  • 12.1. Configuring Replication
• 13. Harvester and Harvest List Editor
  • 13.1. Configuring Harvester
  • 13.2. Harvester Properties and their Functions
  • 13.3. Configuring a Harvest Site (Instructions for Site Contact)
  • 13.4. Running Harvester
  • 13.5. Reviewing Harvest Reports
• 14. OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
  • 14.1. EML and Dublin Core
  • 14.2. Metacat OAI-PMH Service Interfaces
  • 14.3. Configuring and Running Metacat OAI-PMH
  • 14.4. OAI-PMH Error Codes
• 15. Event Logging
• 16. Enabling Web Searches: Sitemaps
  • 16.1. Configuration
  • 16.2. Creating a Sitemap
  • 16.3. Serving Your Sitemaps
  • 16.4. Registering a Sitemap
• 17. Appendix: Metacat Properties
  • 17.1. Server Properties
  • 17.2. Application Properties
  • 17.3. Solr Properties
  • 17.4. Database Properties
  • 17.5. Authorization and Authentication Properties
  • 17.6. XML/EML Properties
  • 17.7. Data Manager Properties
  • 17.8. EZID Properties
  • 17.9. Sitemap Properties
  • 17.10. Additional Properties
• 18. Appendix: Development Issues
  • 18.1. Identifier Management
  • 18.2. DOI Management
  • 18.3. Metacat Usage Statistics Service
  • 18.4. ORE Model for Derived Data Packages

Indices and tables

• Index
• Search Page