Metacat: Data Preservation and Discovery System

Version: 3.4.2 Release - See Release Notes - DOI: doi:10.18739/A2DF6K55B

Send feedback and bugs to:

• developers@ecoinformatics.org
• http://github.com/NCEAS/metacat

Metacat is repository software for preserving 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. Hundreds of 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 can be easily searched, compared, merged, or used in other ways because the data are well and consistently described.

Installation

See installation notes for detailed instructions for your OS.

Support Policy

Metacat follows an accelerated end-of-life policy. Due to limited maintenance funding, we support only the current release: the latest tagged release, which is also the HEAD of the main branch. Older releases do not receive backported security fixes or ongoing support. See SECURITY.md and CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

Documentation

See the docs directory for detailed documentation and installation instructions.

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

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

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

Major Known Bugs or Feature Requests (see http://github.com/NCEAS/metacat/issues)

If you discover a bug please report it, either by email (above) or by using our bug tracking system (http://github.com/NCEAS/metacat/issues). There is a list of currently unimplemented issues that we are working on for the next release.

Citation

Cite this software as:

Jing Tao, Matthew Brooke, Dou Mok, Ian Nesbitt, Matthew B. Jones. 2025. Metacat: Data Preservation and Discovery System (3.4.2). Arctic Data Center. Software. doi:10.18739/A2DF6K55B

Current Contributors

• Jing Tao (tao@nceas.ucsb.edu) ORCID: 0000-0002-1209-5268
• Matthew Brooke (brooke@nceas.ucsb.edu) ORCID: 0000-0002-1472-913X
• Dou Mok (mok@nceas.ucsb.edu) ORCID: 0000-0002-6076-8092
• Ian Nesbitt (nesbitt@nceas.ucsb.edu): ORCID: 0000-0001-5828-6070
• Matthew B. Jones (jones@nceas.ucsb.edu): ORCID: 0000-0003-0077-4738

Previous Contributors

• Chad Berkley (berkley@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Jing Tao (tao@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Jivka Bojilova (bojilova@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Dan Higgins (higgins@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Saurabh Garg (sgarg@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Duane Costa (dcosta@lternet.edu)
• Veronique Connolly (connolly@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Chris Jones (cjones@msi.ucsb.edu)
• John Harris (harris@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Callie Bowdish (bowdish@ecoinformatics.org)
• Will Tyburczy (tyburczy@ecoinformatics.org)
• Matthew Perry (perry@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Chad Burt (underbluewaters@gmail.com)
• Ben Leinfelder (leinfelder@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Chris Barteau (barteau@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Shaun Walbridge (walbridge@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Michael Daigle (daigle@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Lauren Walker (walker@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Peter Slaughter (slaughter@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Rob Nahf (rnahf@epscor.unm.edu)
• Matthew Brooke (brooke@nceas.ucsb.edu)

Patch contributors

• Andrea Chadden (chadden@nceas.ucsb.edu)
• Johnoel Ancheta (johnoel@hawaii.edu)
• Owen Jones (owen.jones@imperial.ac.uk)

Funding and Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under several grants along with the Department of Energy, the Mellon Foundation, and the Sloan Foundation. 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). Grant numbers (reverse chronological):

• NSF 2042102: Arctic Data Center (2021)
• DOE ESS-DIVE (2020)
• DOE ESS-DIVE (2017)
• NSF 1546024: Arctic Data Center (2015)
• NSF 1443062: MetaDIG (2014)
• NSF 1448821: Make Data Count (2014)
• NSF 1430508: DataONE (Data Observation Network for Earth) (2014)
• Mellon Foundation (2009)
• NSF 0830944: DataONE project (DataNet) (2008)
• Mellon Foundation (2006)
• NSF 0225676: SEEK project (ITR) (2002)
• NSF 99-04777: MARINE project (DBI) (1999)
• NSF 99-80154: KNB project (KDI) (1999)

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 product includes software developed by the Apache Software Foundation (http://www.apache.org/). See the LICENSE file in lib/apache for details.

The source code, object code, and documentation in the com.oreilly.servlet package is copyright and owned by Jason Hunter. See the cos-license.html file for details of the license. Licensor retains title to and ownership of the Software and all enhancements, modifications, and updates to the Software.

This software includes the JDBC driver for PostgreSQL. See the postgresql-license.txt file for details.