Hi all, thank you for those positive votes. A good time to share what i consider important aspects of the project (you still have an option to revoke your +1 after reading this)…
Francois already mentioned my push for Search Engine Optimisation. It’s an important aspect, recent research in the UK revealed that over 75% of the traffic to their national portal arrived in individual dataset pages directly from a search engine. In the recent releases we have improved SEO quite a bit (thanx also to the json-ld implementation of Francois), however with the intensive use of angular/ajax we still have quite some challenges with SEO.
INSPIRE and OGC compliance are important aspects to the project, however in general it’s hard to find budget for improving/maintaining it. I hope the upcoming migration to Elastic, huge thanks to camp to camp and Francois, will release us from the final limitations to support the corner test cases of the CITE tests. I hope as a community we’ll find some funding soon to work on OGC API support in GeoNetwork. OAPI Records as an addition to CSW, but also OAPI-Features and OAPI-Maps as addition to WFS and WMS. We already have the OpenAPI libraries available, so the effort shouldn’t even be that hard. With OGC API the transition to non XML encodings gets more upfront. GeoNetwork is quite XML oriented in its core, but at some point we should consider to add alternative encodings, such as JSON-schema, RDF/JSON-LD. Which are used in initiatives such as DCAT and STAC. The move to Elastic may also facilitate that aspect, as it is also JSON oriented.
I want to mention Michels struggles to improve the general UI of the core product. Michel has issued a large number of PR’s to improve visual aspects, but it’s a challenge to facilitate a consistent look and feel, in small iterations, with limited hours, on a product with a fast development cycle as geonetwork.
Last months I’ve tried to streamline translations and followed documentation a bit with Jo and Francois. But this remains to be a struggle with available time. Recently Victor started helping out on the documentation, I hope this will give a push to the aspect. I have to tell you that the transifex community frequently surprises me positively, we have various languages fully translated (including documentation), without hearing much from the contributors.
I have to mention here that I’m a bit puzzled about the direction of a project like geonetwork. On one hand I appreciate the single-click installer to have a fully operational system, very convenient to novice users and smaller organisations. On the other hand there is a big drive to split up the project into manageable and scalable components (micro services approach). The move to Elastic is an important representation of this. It means that managing the system will require a specialist soon (if that is not already the case). An aspect to this is Authentication/Authorisation. I guess this discussion could be quite relevant today, an option to research is if we can delegate authentication to OAuth/SAML and authorization on records to a third party, such as Elastic Search. Delegating harvesting to a remote application for sure will benefit the overall performance of the system and decrease the complexity of the project.
I’m combining this PSC membership with a PSC membership of the pygeoapi community. I’m mostly focussed on managing SEO of records in that project. Experience that I use in improving those aspects in GeoNetwork and GeoServer. The pygeoapi community has a strong focus on OGC compliance. Maybe the focus sometimes even is too much on OGC compliance, and too little on use cases for the software. In GeoNetwork we sometimes have the opposite, we focus too much on a use case, and tend to forget that with a bit of extra effort we can adopt a standard. Or guide the standard bodies in improving an existing standard to facilitate new cases. I hope I can contribute my experience from both communities back to each of them.
Looking forward to meeting you in a next PSC meeting (virtual Bolsena?).
Ciao, Paul.
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Vriendelijke groeten / Kind regards,
Jose García
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The Netherlands
T: +31 (0)318 416664
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