SEDAC Information Gateway

 

The Information Gateway mission aspires to support greater communication and exchange of data between the Earth and socioeconomic science communities. Key catalog-related elements in this effort include:

• SEDAC Dataset Catalog browse a collection of SEDAC data holdings covering topics ranging from biodiversity, climate change, and hazard vulnerability to population, poverty and food security, and sustainability indicators.

• SEDAC Gateway search a distributed system of metadata catalogs, including the SEDAC catalog, affiliated with national and international organizations, registered with the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse using the Z39.50 information retrieval protocol.

• Access Geographic Data traditional and modern-day tools for discovering geographic data across the interdisciplinary spectrum.

• Portals, Gateways, Archives additional entry points for accessing data prominent in the social, environmental, and Earth sciences.

SEDAC maintains a metadata catalog of numerous data holdings based on the FGDC Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM). In addition, SEDAC has extended the CSDGM to represent several applications and services in the catalog. These records are also converted to comply with NASA requirements for visibility in the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) and the EOSDIS ClearingHOuse (ECHO) catalogs. Metadata practices and procedures are documented in our Metadata section.

SEDAC is transitioning to GeoNetwork, a standardized and decentralized spatial information management environment, designed to enable access to geo-referenced databases, cartographic products and related metadata from a variety of sources. Developed by the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), GeoNetwork is an open-source catalog application for managing spatially referenced resources using the International Standards Organization (ISO) 19115 metadata standard. SEDAC is also implementing web services (map, feature, and coverage) for selected datasets based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications. Both, legacy Z39.50 catalogs and OGC Web services, are supported by GeoNetwork.