Study on Web-oriented geo-data sharing infrastructure and key techniques based on metadata

Development of metadata theories and their application techniques provide a solution to mass data sharing in Web. This paper analyzed the system infrastructure and studied key application techniques for geosciences data sharing based on metadata. To overcome the incompatibility of various metadata standards of geosciences, uniform metadata architecture is designed to ensure different discipline metadata standards working harmonically in the system. This top-down hierarchy model is composed of core metadata, schema metadata and application profile metadata. A metadata management system (MMS), the presentation of the geo-data sharing model, is developed in using RDF/XML technology recommended by W3C. MMS´s hierarchy includes 3 tiers, i.e., application tier, RDF/XML resource description tier, and data resources tier. RDF/XML, served as a middle tier, plays an important part in MMS. Development and application of MMS in the Data-Sharing Network of China Earth System Science has proved that this technique solution is suitable for geosciences data sharing Web oriented