Pasta: A Network-level Architecture Design for Automating the Creation of Synthetic Products in the LTER Network

The LTER Network is now within its "Decade of Synthesis". Pro- viding Network-level synthetic data products, however, is still a chal- lenge for researchers in the Network and its 26 research sites. The Network Information System group at the LTER Network Oce has designed and prototyped an automated Network-level synthesis archi- tecture called "Pasta". The Pasta architecture extends the data ware- house notion of extraction and loading of external data into a central- ized data store by building on key technology already in use at the LTER Network - primarily the Ecological Metadata Language and the Metacat database. Once loaded, the source or site data are trans- formed from the local site schema and into a global schema, and a new metadata document cast as EML is generated and inserted back into the Metacat database. Finally, the data that conforms to the global schema, called "synthetic" data, are exposed to the commu- nity through a number of dierent interfaces, including HTML and web services. This architecture is currently being developed through a "proof-of-concept" approach for the "Trends" project, and has recently been demonstrated at the LTER 2006 All Scientists Meeting in Estes Park, Colorado.