hello,
in the Dutch géoportail project, known as NGR (“nationaal georegister”, see http://nationaalgeoregister.nl) we have developed some things that we think might be useful to port to the common GeoNetwork trunk codebase.
Here is a list of them. I’d like your opinion on whether you agree to see it in trunk code, and any other comments you’d like to make.
(1) performance improvement to search. We greatly improved the speed of the search service, by replacing the “lucene.xsl” with an equivalent function in Java, and by retrieving the list of regions only once in application lifetime from the DB (rather than at every search request).
(2) support for INSPIRE. We implemented a number of INSPIRE-specific search parameters, along with a INSPIRE validation function. Now this may be Europe-specific, so maybe we could make it invisible in the GUI; if you’d want to display it then change a css style. It might also be nice to support INSPIRE as one of the predefined formats in a template, but I’m not immediately sure how well that goes as I don’t think there is a dedicated XSD that defines INSPIRE.
(3) validation. We implemented validation (XSD+Schematron) to run at every time a metadata is inserted or changed, and we persist the result. This way, we can always show the validation status of a particular metadata, without having to run validation on it again (we use it in the display of search results).
(4) organizations. We implemented the notion of “organization”, by fiddling a bit with the existing GeoNetwork notion of “group”. I think the SwissTopo project does things similarly. Let’s put support for organizations into GN trunk, but ideally not in this way as a hack to groups, but rather as a first-class citizen in GN’s model. In NGR we also have a dedicated “organizations” page, which allows for one-click search for metadata from a particular organization, and shows some statistics about the metadata of each organization.
(5) service monitoring. We measure the availability of all services (WMS etc.) that are advertised in the metadata. A percentage expressing the availability is shown on said organizations page and in the search results summaries.
(6) open layers. We replaced InterMap with a OpenLayers implementation. So does the SwissTopo project, and maybe other adaptations of standard GeoNetwork. Let’s put a common OpenLayers map viewer in the GeoNetwork trunk.
(7) user interface. We show metadata in their own page, rather like in the standard GN editor, and put in place a number of tabs to display just a portion of the entire metadata, depending on which tab you select. I think similar functions are developed in the Australian BlueNetMEST project, at least in the editor. Let’s find a common solution to put a “tabbed” view of metadata into trunk.
(8) local rating. In GeoNetwork, the users’ rating of metadata is broadcast to all GN nodes known to the one where the rating takes place, and the resulting rating is weighed across all GN nodes that store that same metadata that’s being rated. In NGR we didn’t want this and we simply store rating info on the one and only node where the rating happens. We could add this to trunk by way of a configuration option for admins (local / distributed rating).
Looking forward to your comments. Any of these proposed changes that gain popular support will be added to the WIKI as change proposals, so then the PSC can vote on those.
Kind regards
Heikki Doeleman