[GeoNetwork-devel] GeoNetwork Metadata Versioning

Dear list,

An Australian governmental organisation short listed GeoNetwork as a
potential metadata management tool.

However, a few key requirements are missing in GN. The most important
one is the following:

Versioning
----------
      * All changes in the metadata must be tracked
      * It must be possible to bring up the version of records of a
        specific date/time
      * It must be possible to search through the metadata the way it
        was at a certain date/time
      * It must be possible to show the full history of a record

Today we had a chat with Simon Pigot and we came up with the following
options for implementation:

     1. Full DB approach for keeping history of changes (history table)
     2. Use SVN for storage of metadata XML and take it that bit out of
        the DB
     3. Create a versioning add-on to GN that using SVN and some
        post-change hook to store the changes into SVN

The idea of using SVN for storage has been discussed by some members of
the GN community before (I think off-line). There is a Java API for SVN
available, we've been told, so it should not be too hard to implement
that.

We prefer option 3.

Our questions are:
      * What does the GN community think of this idea?
      * Does this fit within the ideas of where GN should go?
      * Does this conflict with any work that the ebXML team is doing
        now and if so, could we team up and work together on this?

Kind regards,

Roald

--
Roald de Wit
Software Engineer
roald.dewit@anonymised.com

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