An on-line collaborative data management system

Scientific data continues to grow in volume making the tasks of managing, accessing and sharing such data more challenging. Providing data to scientists via scientific gateways or collaborative portals can aid scientists in achieving these tasks. This paper presents a general data management system that has been built on top of Elgg, an open source social networking platform. The tool enables scientists to upload, browse, view and share a wide variety of scientific data, as well as define and evolve meta data standards in a collaborative manner. The data management system is currently being used as part of GeoChronos, a scientific gateway for Earth observation scientists, for creating and sharing collections of spectral and satellite data.