The MEDI authoring tool has been developed to encourage data collectors and scientists to produce metadata descriptions for their datasets.

The MEDI authoring tool is browser-enabled and operates in a client-server configuration. Clients can access MEDI on a local network or over the internet.

Some of the features of the MEDI Server are:

• Operates as a service under Apache Tomcat 4.0.4 using HTML
• Uses standard HTTP protocol, hence can be accessed via internet or intranet
• Metadata records are stored as DIF-XML files
• Spatial functionality is delivered using Scalable Vector Graphics (Adobe SVG plug-in 3.0)
• Data can be imported and exported using standard ZIP formats