With explosively increasing volumes of remote sensing, modelling and other Earth science data available, and the popularity of the Internet, scientists are now facing challenges to publish and to find interesting data sets effectively and efficiently. Metadata has been recognized as a key technology to ease the searching and retrieval of Earth science data. In this paper, we discuss the DIMES (DIstributed MEtadata Server) prototype system. Designed to be flexible yet simple, DIMES uses XML to represent, store, retrieve and interoperate metadata in a distributed environment. DIMES accepts metadata in any well-formed XML format and thus assumes the "tree" semantics of metadata entries. Additional domain knowledge can be represented as specific links through XML's ID/IDREF mechanism. DIMES provides a number of mechanisms, including the "nearest-neighbor search", to navigate and to search metadata. Though started for the Earth science community, DIMES can be easily extended to serve scientific communities in other disciplines.
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