Hi all & the GeoNetwork development team:
I would like to know how to co-operate with your development team. It is important for us to know at this stage as we are about to embark on a substantial development drive.
_
Background_
I have just completed a project during which we have had a look at SDI user requirements for the CSIR (a large para-state organisation) in South Africa.
We have investigated GeoNetwork and like what we see. So we have decided to base our organisational SDI on GeoNetwork and have already done a basic installation. We are running it with MySQL and have already got over 3700 metadata records loaded and seem to have no problems. Our primary aim is to establish an operational SDI for the CSIR. Our secondary goal is to develop an SDI reference architecture for wider use in the country.
_Our needs_
We need to build a reference implementation of SANS1878 (the South African National Implementation of ISO19115)
We need to add custom functionality requested by our users. I list a few examples:
- Ontology or Thesaurus support
- User feedback in terms of dataset usefulness / errors
_Discussion_
Our organisation is committed to the open source ethic. We need an operational SDI and we are committed to its development and understand that our requirements are none trivial. We will make the necessary resources available to complete all of the development. We can approach this in a number of ways:
- We can start from scratch and do our own thing - (Bad idea!)
- We can base our development on the current GeoNetwork and then just carry on from there. But that will mean that our final product will no longer be compatible with GeoNetwork, and so we will not benifit from any further developments on GeoNetwork, and neither will the rest of the community benefit from our development.
- We can collaborate with GeoNetwork. This is the preferred option but we don't know how to even start this...
_Question_
- Do you have a framework within which such collaboration can be done? If so how does it work, how can we become part of it? What are the requirements?
Yours sincerely
Gaby van Wyk
