Metacat 3.3.0 Release

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Jing Tao

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Dec 12, 2025, 6:49:17 PM12/12/25

to ESS-DIVE, eml-dev, devel...@dataone.org

We are pleased to announce a new release of Metacat (3.3.0), a turnkey data repository software platform used across the earth science community. It can be downloaded here. This release introduces support for osti-elink v2json (replacing the deprecated xml format) to communicate with the OSTI DOI service. It also includes more performance enhancements for indexing datasets.

For new installations, see the Installation notes and the Administrator’s Guide.

Metacat can also be deployed on Kubernetes, using a Helm chart; see the helm README. Important:

If you are upgrading an existing helm deployment, please be sure to read the chart upgrade section of the Release Notes.
We are continuing to move away from using Bitnami helm charts for production dependencies. The Metacat chart now assumes you will provide your own instances of PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ, which are no longer included as sub-charts. See the Release Notes for details.

Enhancements:

Support osti-elink v2json (replaces deprecated xml format) to communicate with the osti doi service.
Add trace logging of system metadata changes in the updateSystemmetadata API call (Issue #2240)
Ant build: remove dependency on obsolete maven-ant-tasks library

Upgrades and Bug Fixes include:

Upgrade DataONE-Indexer library to 3.2.0 in metacat-index (see dataone-indexer Release Notes for details)
Disallow MN.updateSystemMetadata clients changes to the replica section of system metadata (Issue #1867)
Fix access policy and replication policy manipulation (Issue #2206)
Bump commons-io from 2.16.1 to 2.20.0
Update Docker base image from tomcat:9.0.102-jre17-temurin-noble to tomcat:9.0.112-jre17-temurin-noble
Update bundled MetacatUI to version 2.36.2

About Metacat

Metacat (https://github.com/NCEAS/metacat) provides a standardized but customizable platform for preserving data and metadata in many formats. It helps scientists find, understand and effectively use data sets they manage. or that have been created by others. Hundreds of thousands of data sets are currently documented in a standardized way and stored in Metacat systems, enabling the scientific community to access a vast array of scientific data that can be easily searched, compared, merged, or adapted for other purposes due to its thorough and consistent description.

Metacat is compliant with the DataONE network, making it easy for organizations to participate in the global DataONE data federation, and integrates with ORCiD and DOI identifier systems. It also supports the customizable MetacatUI client-side application for searching and browsing data in Metacat and DataONE, creating an easily-deployed system with advanced search and discovery features pre-installed.

The open source Metacat system is maintained by NCEAS (https://nceas.ucsb.edu) and DataONE (https://dataone.org), and is used by repositories worldwide to manage data collections. We're an open community, collaborating on the shared development of this common data platform, to improve efficiency and sustainability in the open data ecosystem. We welcome all types of contributions, from feedback on features and bugs, to documentation, code, and everything in between. Please join us!

We hope that this software is useful to you. We welcome feedback and comments that will further improve the application. Please submit bugs and problems through our bug tracking system (https://github.com/NCEAS/metacat/issues) and send general feedback to devel...@dataone.org.