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Part III. Appendix 2: Data TransportOPeNDAP’s contribution to this issue may be its emphasis upon tailoring software libraries to theexpectations of client applications. Up to now, most effort has been directed toward moving numericaldata that originates as subsets of archived data sets from a remote server into a local applicationsuch as MATLAB TM . There is no apparent reason, however, why metadata could not bedownloaded even from multiple remote sites into a local database, for instance, in a similar fashion,there to be queried in any way the user likes. Presumably software would trace query results andmaintain links to the data, not yet downloaded, at remote sites, perhaps not even the same sites asserved the metadata.NVODS already contains gateways to distributed archived information; as these increase in numberand sophistication, users should be able to choose one or more of these mediating sites that suittheir purposes and preferences for query and response formats.OBIS explicitly concentrates on facilitating storage of and access to distributed metadata.OGC’s requirements for metadata storage and query are not known at present; DEI/FSDM’s areunknown, too.SRB’s experience may well be relevant here; each installation of SRB requires access to a database. Itmay be that functions already exist to download and query a collection’s metadata; this Team willbecome better informed about SRB’s relevant capabilities.184