Hi Paul,
here are my comments:
Dear List,
I am working on a project including the setup of a catalog for all
satellite imagery available in our organization (several thousands of
images).
We are considering with a lot of interest Geonetwork 2.1 for its CSW2
interface. After having looked at the emails exchanged on this list
since January 2006, I have a few questions which would help us to decide
if/how GN is the right way to go for us. I would very much appreciate if
someone could answer them.
1) How is handled the geographic component in the catalogue? I am mainly
thinking about the indexing done by Lucene. Does it have spatial
filtering capabilities?
The current implementation supports only the bounding-box (which is the only
mandatory operator). A more advanced support is planned to afford the Earth
Observation profile. The idea here is to use the Java Topology Suite (JTS) library
to perform spatial queries and to use lucene to drive it. We should start developing
soon.
2) How well is Postgresql supported?
It depends on what you mean by 'well supported'. There are some users that
are using it even if we did not provide any sql script to create the schema.
However, GeoNetwork 2.1-alpha2 already have a sql script for Postgres and
I'm currently adding a dbms configuration panel that includes support for it.
3) Is there a way to update entries in the catalogue in batch mode? For
example, when the address of an organisation changed...
No there isn't. The possibility to update the metadata as a whole can be done
in a few days but the possibility to update only a part of it is more difficult.
This feature, together to other xml services related to metadata (like insert)
seems to be very usefull for users.
4) From a post from Andrea, I understood that you are going to implement
an Earth Observation profile. Could you provide me with more details
about it? Is it the OGC document 06-079? When do you plan to have it ready?
Yes, it is the 06-079 spec. The kickoff is planned for January/February while the
deadline is 8 months from that.
This work has been committed by ESA and aims at providing a CSW2 interface
for EO products in the HMA project. GeoNetwork will be able to search through
and visualize SAR/ATM/OHR metadata. It is not clear if GeoNetwork will be used
to edit them. Anyway, this will be a prototype just to see how well it integrates.
Maybe a more robust implementation will use the ebRIM model (which is under
discussion). At this stage there is very little clear enough to be given for sure.
5) We would need a way to update the catalogue without any GUI
interaction. Would the web folder harvesting functionality mentioned on
this list be the way to go? Do you know when you plan to have it ready?
I hope to be able to finish it by February.
6) When is GN2.1 expected to be released? Do you know when a CSW2
harvesting function would be implemented?
I think that GN 2.1 will be ready for the next GeoNetwork workshop (maybe in
May) but the betas in February/March should be robust enough for a heavy usage.
The CSW2 harvesting is not planned because the base spec is too abstract and
the ISO profile spec is still under development. Anyway, the CSW2 harvesting
will be less powerfull compared to the GN's one. My opinion is that the CSW2
harvesting still needs some review work.
I apologize for this long list of questions but I am really interested
in Geonetwork and would love to use it for our project!
Best regards
Paul Hasenohr
Cheers,
Andrea