This project is an evolution of the Identify Tool that was developed to allow ORNL DAAC staff doing quality assurance work on datasets in the publication process to quickly get information about a particular coordinate (lat/lon) as a means to check information in the dataset.
The tool is being expanded to support other projects, including the National Microbiome Data Collaborative (NMDC). For NMDC, there's a particular use case of wanting to annotate the metadata for a sample collected at a particular time and place. Those annotations can include elevation above sea level, land cover classification, soil classificaiton, and climatology.