Active Asynchronous Transaction Management in High-Autonomy Federated Environment Using Data Agents: Global Change Master Directory v8.0 Omran Bukhres, Srinivasan Sikkupparbathyam, Kishan Nagendra, Zina Ben Miled, Marcelo Areal, Lola Olsen, Chris Gokey, David Kendig, Rosy Cordova, Gene Major, and Janine Savage   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Demonstrations Abstract The Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) is an Earth science information repository that specifically tracks research data on global climatic change. Building a directory of Earth science metadata that allows the exchange of metadata content among partner organizations is challenging due to the complex issues involved in supporting heterogeneous metadata schema, database schema, database implementation and platforms. This demonstration presents the design of the MD8 (Master Directory v8.0), which allows automated exchange of metadata content among Earth science collaborators through a proposed asynchronous distributed transaction protocol. Specifically, the demonstration focuses on the local data agent that captures local database updates and broadcasts them to other cooperating nodes asynchronously using an announcer DiSC'03 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery