Hi all,
Doug Nebert of the FGDC has been assessing GeoNetwork for potential use
as a platform for a geospatial clearinghouse for GEOSS. He's uncovered
a few problems and some missing capabilities and has asked a team of
programmers from George Mason Univ and myself to investigate addressing
those issues.
I've already briefly discussed the proposed changes, primarily
supporting harvesting, with Jeroen and at his suggestion am going to
post our proposed efforts in a series of emails to follow this one. The
intention is to make the enhancements necessary to make GeoNetwork a
robust harvesting platform and to contribute those changes back to the
main development branch. We'll do this, once we have consensus on
changes to be made and how best to implement them, by asking Jeroen to
set up a branch sandbox from the main svn repository for us to use. We
don't wish to duplicate efforts already underway by other developers, so
we'll coordinate closely with the group here in order to make the
process as seamless as possible.
In summary, we plan on implementing modifications that would accomplish
the following:
- perform configurable harvest from remote WAF, CSW v2.0.2 (at least)
and Z39.50 sources
- process/convert/manage metadata of various formats (CSW ebRIM, mostly,
depending on existing support for FGDC, CSW ISO, etc) into ISO format
- assign collections to be harvested for local search or flagged for
remote distributed search
- migrate the existing Z39.50 code to use jzkit v2 (which I understand
Simon may have already done with BlueMEST)
- implementing an administrative function to display system logs
- adding some sort of term expansion function to the existing thesaurus
support
I'll discuss each of these in more detail in the messages that follow so
that we can discuss them individually. I'll post them to Trac, as well.
--
Archie
-- Archie Warnock warnock@anonymised.com
-- A/WWW Enterprises www.awcubed.com
-- As a matter of fact, I _do_ speak for my employer.