The design, development and operation of a distributed data inventory system

The design, development and operations of a distributed data inventory system is a concern of many government agencies and commercial enterprises. All are searching for ways to harness the information and data resources that are available, as well as provide a framework for bringing future data into an unifying structure. We provide a discussion of the design, development and operation of a system which can be used to build, manage and access distributed data inventories. We discuss the major decisions we made, why we made those decisions and what the end product of our efforts has been. Currently the system we describe is being used as the data access system for the Plasma Interactions Node (PDS/PPI) of NASA´s Planetary Data System in order to provide access to fields and particles data returned from NASA´s planetary missions