Inside an Environmental Data Archive WWW Site

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC), which is associated with NASA`s Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), provides access to tabular and imagery datasets used in ecological and environmental research. Because of its large and diverse data holdings, twin challenges for the ORNL DAAC are to help users find data of interest from the hundreds of thousands of files available at the DAAC without overwhelming them and to manage such a large collection of data. Therefore, the ORNL DAAC has developed a number of World Wide Web (WWW) tools such as the Biogeochemical Information Ordering Management Environment (BIOME), a WWW search and order system, as well as WWW-based data management and configuration control tools. This paper describes the specialized attributes incorporated into these systems that allow for easy access to and management of the data.