2001 LTER Site Flash

KBS

Timothy T. Bergsma

KBS has a new information manager (me) as of Fall 2000. During my tenure, we have consolidated our LTER digital resources onto a single NT server, which handles our website and networking traffic. We added an Intranet to our website, which allows seamless browsing of priviledged resources from on-site IP addresses, and seamless browsing-after-authentication from off-site locations. The intranet houses a newly created Dataset Registry, which provides links to management plans, management records, data locations and metadata locations. The registry is currently implemented as html.

We continue to increase our reliance on RDBMS as a data storage-and-delivery platform. Several management issues are emerging as general problems that may have generalized solutions in a RDBMS context:

1. dynamic, selective association of metatdata with primary data (e.g. field notes specific to a certain date or range of dates);

2. dynamic, explicit creation of a composite data set from two or more related data sources (e.g. creating a temporally continuous record of some environmental parameter from partial records at multiple monitoring stations);

3. non-coercive integration of legacy data sources with active data sources (e.g., the 'same' data now reported in a 'new' format, and you don't want to reformat 12-years-worth of data just to accomodate. Similar to #2 above.)

4. flexible yet robust implementation of web-based field logs.

I look forward to learning how other IM's are handling these (and related) issues.

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