Distributed data and metadata management in the GENIE project

An outline is given of the support for distributed data and metadata that is provided within the ESRC funded UK Global Environmental Change Data Network Facility (also referred to as the GENIE, Global Environmental Network for Information Exchange, project). The task of the project is to assist researchers investigating global environmental change to locate and access data that may be contained in any one of several hundred data storage systems located at many different places (some of which are `data centres´ specifically set up to provide this function). At the data level the system would be what has been described as a federated database or a multidatabase. The data are managed by the data centres that `own´ them and the GENIE project merely provides a data transport service for a complete dataset or some agreed subset or product provided by the DBMS at the Data Centre. At the metadata level, each user (researcher or data administrator) within GENIE has their own IMP (information management processor) which maintains the metadata known to that user and provides the interface to the remainder of the system. The total system consists entirely of a collection of IMPs and every IMP is owned by, and is the responsibility of, some individual person. That person must decide what information to store (either by entering it directly or after obtaining it from some other IMP) and how it should be indexed to facilitate later retrieval. They must also decide how much, if any, of the information known to them should be made available to other people to answer their queries