  Mercury is a federated metadata harvesting, search and retrieval tool based
on both open source and software developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It
was originally developed for NASA, and the Mercury development consortium now
includes funding from NASA, USGS, and DOE. A major new version of Mercury was
developed during 2007. This new version provides orders of magnitude
improvements in search speed, support for additional metadata formats,
integration with Google Maps for spatial queries, support for RSS delivery of
search results, among other features. Mercury provides a single portal to
information contained in disparate data management systems. It collects
metadata and key data from contributing project servers distributed around the
world and builds a centralized index. The Mercury search interfaces then allow
the users to perform simple, fielded, spatial and temporal searches across
these metadata sources. This centralized repository of metadata with
distributed data sources provides extremely fast search results to the user,
while allowing data providers to advertise the availability of their data and
maintain complete control and ownership of that data.
