Mercury Distributed Metadata Management, Data Discovery and Access System

2008 Reuse Contribution Award Recipients (alphabetically): Ranjeet Devarakonda, Jim Green, Chris Lindsley, Giri Palanisamy, Tim Rhyne, Bruce Wilson

Contributed by the Mercury Consortium at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, this open source software uses a service-oriented architecture (SOA) approach to capturing and managing metadata in support of ten Earth science programs sponsored by organizations including NASA, USGS, and the DOE. Mercury supports data archiving, data discovery through various search strategies (text string, fielded, spatial, temporal), data reuse, and longer-term scientific digital data stewardship, and supports a range of recognized data exchange and interoperability protocols and a range of metadata standards. Some additional benefits to reusing the Mercury software are that it is customizable, inexpensive, and compatible with Internet search engines. Using a consortium approach to development, members share general costs and benefits to reduce development costs and produce a more reusable, portable, robust, feature-rich application.

Mercury home page: http://mercury.ornl.gov/