New Metadata Pages and Bulk Download Policy

OpenTopography is happy to announce several new system updates released this past Friday. These updates focus on metadata presentation, as well as some important changes to bulk data access via OpenTopography. Details:

• Enhanced metadata pages for all datasets: Each dataset in OpenTopography now has an expanded and comprehensive metadata page that provides an overview of the dataset, links to the project survey report, dataset outline, as well as other related information. Click the "Full Metadata" link on each dataset page to access the metadata information.
• Each dataset metadata record can now be exported as both plain text and CSW-compliant ISO 19139 XML. This is part of OpenTopography's ongoing work to develop a CSW interface to OpenTopography's data catalog; a full OpenTopography CSW interface will come in a future release.
• The OpenTopography Metadata page now provides a complete list of metadata records (see above) for all hosted data.
• New point cloud bulk download interface and policies: Historically, bulk download point cloud access has only been available to OpenTopography power users. The goal of providing simple http access to the tiled lidar point cloud files is to facilitate access to large volumes of data for advanced user who want to work with complete datasets (as opposed to the area of interest queries supported by OpenTopography's map-based interface). Starting with this OpenTopography release we have changed our bulk download policy to allow access to these data for all registered OpenTopography users instead of just power users. To streamline downloads of these potentially massive datasets we're now serving bulk data exclusively in the lossless LASZip format which significantly reduces file sizes. Finally, as part of this release, we've migrated hosting of the the bulk data to the new San Diego Supercomputer Center Cloud - a 5.5 petabyte storage system that provides cost effective and scaleable storage for large datasets.
• Other updates in this release that are less visible to users include code cleanups and bug fixes, as well as migration of all OpenTopography backups to the SDSC Cloud.