Speaker
Description
Metadata management is one of three major areas of scientific
data management along with replica management and workflow
management. Metadata is the information describing the data stored in a data
item such as a file or an object. It includes the data item provenance, recording
conditions, format and other attributes. MetaCat is a metadata management
database designed and developed for High Energy Physics experiments.
As Rucio is becoming a popular product to be used as the replica management
component, MetaCat was desinged to be conceptually compatible with Rucio and
to be able to work with Rucio as the replica management component.
Main objectives of MetaCat are:
- Provide a flexible mechanism to store and manage file dataset metadata of arbitrary complexity
- Provide a mechanism to retrieve the metadata for a file or a dataset
- Efficiently query the metadata database for files or datasets matching user
defined criteria expressed in terms of the metadata - Provide a transparent mechanism to access external metadata sources
to logically incorporate the external metadata into queries without copying them
One of the MetaCat features is MQL - metadata query language developed specifically
for this application. The article will discuss the architecture, functionality and
features of MetaCat as well as the current status of the project.
