How to connect an existing data centre

The APPLICATE Data Portal is a metadata driven data portal. This implies that data are hosted and served by the portal and contributing data centres which expose discovery metadata on the datasets hosted. Once initiated, the APPLICATE Data Portal will regularly (once daily) harvests discovery metadata from the contributing data centres and ingest this in the Data Catalogue. Provided the data is provided in the appropriate form (encoding) the APPLICATE Data Portal is capable of transforming and combining datasets. The APPLICATE data portal require data to be served as Cimate and Forecast Convention compliant NetCDF files through OPeNDAP. Further information on how to encode data is provided elsewhere.

In order to connect your data centre to the APPLICATE Data Portal an OAI-PMH end point serving either GCMD DIF or ISO19115 discovery metadata is required. If ISO19115 is used, discovery metadata should include GCMD Science Keywords to describe the parameters measured. If your data centre is hosting much data and APPLICATE relevant data is mixed between other data, a dedicated OAI-PMH set is welcome to simplify the harvest process for the portal.

Other technologies (OGC CSW and OpenSearch) are explored and to a certain extent supported, but the simplest way forward is to use OAI-PMH.