VxOware: software for managing virtual observatory metadata

The recent Heliophysics Virtual Observatory (VxO) effort involves the development of separate observatories with a low overlap in physical domain or area of scientific specialization and a high degree of overlap in metadata management needs. VxOware is a content and metadata management system. While it is intended for use by a VxO specifically, it can also be used by any entity that manages structured metadata. VxOware has many features of a content management system and extensively uses the W3C recommendations for XML (Extensible Markup Language), XQuery (XML Query), and XSLT (Extensible Style Sheet Language Transformations). VxOware has features such as system and user administration, search, user-editable content, version tracking, and a wiki. Besides virtual observatories, the intended user-base of VxOware includes a group or an instrument team that has developed a directory structure of data files and would like to make this data, and its associated metadata, available in the virtual observatory network. One of the most powerful features of VxOware is the ability to link any type of object in the observatory to other objects and the ability for every object to be tagged.     

A late Cenozoic Earth's crust and climate dynamics record from Lake Baikal

The sedimentary record from Lake Baikal (Siberia, Russia) has been an important source of information about paleoclimatic variability in the northern hemisphere and dynamics of continental rift development. A lack of reliable chronology has, however, been a major obstacle to fully utilizing the Baikal archive for time scales beyond about 4-5 Myr. In this paper we use the distribution of ¹⁰Be to establish a new chronology for the longest core drilled in Lake Baikal so far. The ¹⁰Be-based chronology spans the last 8 Myr and provides better constraints on sedimentation rates and consequently on an east-west tectonic extension in the lake, which has been apparently coeval with other rifts in Asia that are related to the Tibetan plateau uplift. Our data also show higher ¹⁰Be flux in the sediment section older then 5 Myr compared with the younger period. This can be explained partly by warm and humid climatic conditions of the Miocene and partly by a high cosmic ray flux to the Earth resulting from possible low geomagnetic field intensity during that time.