Mercury is a distributed

metadata management Metadata management involves managing metadata about other data, whereby this "other data" is generally referred to as content data. The term is used most often in relation to digital media, but older forms of metadata are catalogs, dictionaries, ...

, data discovery and access system. It is a scientific data search system to capture and manage

biogeochemical Biogeochemistry is the scientific discipline that involves the study of the chemical, physical, geological, and biological processes and reactions that govern the composition of the natural environment (including the biosphere, the cryosphere ...

and

ecological Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their biophysical environment, physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosy ...

data in support of the Earth science programs funded by the

United States Department of Energy The United States Department of Energy (DOE) is an executive department of the U.S. federal government that oversees U.S. national energy policy and manages the research and development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons in the United Stat ...

(DOE) and

United States Geological Survey The United States Geological Survey (USGS), formerly simply known as the Geological Survey, is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, ...

(USGS) - Department of Interior (DOI). Mercury was originally developed for

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedi ...

, but the consortium is now supported by USGS and the DOE. Ongoing development of Mercury is done through an informal consortium at

Oak Ridge National Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a U.S. multiprogram science and technology national laboratory sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and administered, managed, and operated by UT–Battelle as a federally funded research an ...

. Mercury is a part of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Environmental Sciences Division (ESD) and a contributor to the Climate Change Science Institute (CCSI).

Technical features

Mercury supports data archiving, data discovery through various search strategies (text string, fielded, spatial, temporal),

data reuse In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted. ...

, and longer-term scientific digital data stewardship, and supports a range of recognized

data exchange Data exchange is the process of taking data structured under a ''source'' schema and transforming it into a ''target'' schema, so that the target data is an accurate representation of the source data.A. Doan, A. Halevy, and Z. Ives.Principles of d ...

and

interoperability Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader def ...

protocols and supports various metadata standards including

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ...

Z39.50 Z39.50 is an international standard client–server, application layer communications protocol for searching and retrieving information from a database over a TCP/IP computer network, developed and maintained by the Library of Congress. It i ...

FGDC The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) is a United States government committee which promotes the coordinated development, use, sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data on a national basis. Its 32 members are representatives from the E ...

Dublin Core 220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...

Darwin Core Darwin Core (often abbreviated to DwC) is an extension of Dublin Core for biodiversity informatics. It is meant to provide a stable standard reference for sharing information on biological diversity ( biodiversity). The terms described in this st ...

Ecological Metadata Language Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata standard developed by and for the ecology discipline. It is based on prior work done by the Ecological Society of America and others, including the Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity. EML is a set o ...

, and

ISO ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Is ...

. Mercury also uses

OAI-PMH The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a protocol developed for harvesting metadata descriptions of records in an archive so that services can be built using metadata from many archives. An implementation of OAI ...

to index metadata records from Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) and redistribute them other data providers

References

External links

USGS Science Data Catalog - powered by MercuryUSGS Mercury Metadata Editor
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mercury Metadata Clearinghouse Metadata Data management software United States Geological Survey United States Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory