Geospatial metadata querying and visualization on the WWW using Java/sup TM/ applets

This paper presents the query and visualization interfaces of the Master Environmental Library (MEL) system. MEL uses the World Wide Web (WWW) to make accessible distributed data whose metadata conform to the Federal Geographic Data Committee's (FGDC) content standards for digital geospatial metadata. The interfaces are implemented as Java/sup TM/ applets and are more intuitive, interactive and possess greater functionality than their Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) counterparts. As well as querying, the interface allows users to visualize and manage the list of query results so that users can more quickly discover the datasets of real interest. Several new tools used to visualize attributes of the metadata are presented.