[GeoNetwork-devel] Sub-templates and User-Centric Interfaces

GeoNetwork GeoNetwork Developer
1

Hi Ted,

Great topic to start off and I'd like to look at the user interface
you've been using to do this!

I'm looking at the micro-interface problem as you call it for GN (and I'm
sure many others are too!) at the moment (still fairly woolly) and
thinking along the lines of:

1.. micro WFS interfaces (with xslts to transform to metadata standard)
to get metadata from other systems using either an xslt somewhere in the
pipeline to convert to the appropriate standard - so effectively you end
up with something like a subtemplate (or component in your terms) of
metadata that can be plugged in to any record. An alternative here is to
use a micro CSW (= metadata-aware WFS in this role)

2. the idea is that the subtemplate of info is referenced via an
identifier from the metadata record (using the id attribute perhaps as
used by Xlinks) and the fields of info from the subtemplate are indexed
for search in Lucene but need not be stored in the metadata record -
which makes the content of the subtemplate slightly easier to keep up to date.

3. there is a role for the GN harvest/proxy manager here to specify,
store and submit the query, schedule updates and keep the Lucene index up
to date and possibly/eventually provide a way for the complete record to
be assembled by a remote site that has harvested the record with its id
references.

Don't forget that this thinking is still woolly :slight_smile: and certainly not
original (as you've already noted :-)) and quite a bit needs to be built
in the editor changes planned for GN (particularly Francois' resolver) as
well as some kind of simple user interface in the editor to manage this.
There may also be some help for this I suspect in the xforms path being
taken by the LisaSoft guys in the user-centric gui proposal so I'm really
interested to hear their thoughts as well.

Cheers,
Simon

==============Original message text===============
On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 7:39:11 +1000 Ted Habermann wrote:

Hello all,

I am renaming this thread from "2.2 release : subtemplates" with the
hope of attracting the attention of some of the people that are evolving
the GeoNetwork User Interface. My experience suggests that these two
concepts might be intimately related.

We have been developing tools for metadata management at NOAA's Data
Centers for a number of years and now manage a repository with tens of
thousands of FGDC compliant records from several Data Centers and
Offices in NOAA. The tool we have been using has a fundamental concept
of component records that could be managed separately and referenced
from composite records which can contain content as well as component
references. We use these components extensively for citations, contacts,
on-line resources, instruments, missions, processing, and algorithms,
all of which are referenced from many metadata records. This is a clear
requirement for us.

We extended this component concept into the user interface by developing
what we called "micro-interfaces", task-specific interfaces used outside
of the context of the complete metadata record. The idea was that these
interfaces would be useful for people that did not understand, or
necessarily care about, the metadata standard, but needed to record
information (enter metadata) as part of their job.

Seems to me that the initial GeoNetwork editing interface is geared
towards editing an entire record (a comprehensive interface). Might be
interesting to cast this task in terms of editing components that get
held together somehow or brought together somehow in the presentation layer.

I realize that these are not original thoughts, I am just hoping to
converge these two threads... I'm sure there are existing resources
relevant to this idea. Two obvious ones are the User Centric GUI and
Editor Enhancements proposals in the wiki. I apologize in advance for
being a bit behind in my reading...

Ted Habermann

--
==== Ted Habermann ===========================
     Enterprise Data Systems Group Leader
     NOAA, National Geophysical Data Center
     V: 303.497.6472 F: 303.497.6513
     "If you want to go quickly, go alone.
     If you want to go far, go together"
     Old Proverb
==== Ted.Habermann@anonymised.com ==================

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2

Simon,

We are definitely thinking along the same woolly lines (I assume that woolly = brainstorm or something like that).

A couple of other thoughts:
1) In a metadata standard specific world (could be a big proviso) where we are developing ISO tools (at least its ISO), I think we could use the MD_Identifier to describe a REST web service that would return components in ISO compliant XML. I am experimenting on this on a very limited scale. We have an Oracle XML database with FGDC compliant metadata. We are defining the ISO crosswalk as views on top of this database and retrieving them using an ID (still lots of dependencies and fragility here at this point). I think we would need a best practice for using the MD_Identifier.authority (a CI_Citation) in this way. It may be a bit hampered by the lack of an CI_OnLineResource in the CI_Citation (how did that happen?).

2) I am also playing around with the idea of using the SemanticMediaWiki as a metadata management interface (WARNING: extreme woollyness). This is an extension to MediaWiki which allows the association of tags (structure) with pages in a wiki. It also allows semantic relationships to be defined that can be extracted with a webservice as RDF... I don't even have this installed yet, but hopefully will soon.

Looking Forward,
Ted

Simon Pigot wrote:

Hi Ted,

Great topic to start off and I'd like to look at the user interface
you've been using to do this!

I'm looking at the micro-interface problem as you call it for GN (and I'm sure many others are too!) at the moment (still fairly woolly) and
thinking along the lines of:

1.. micro WFS interfaces (with xslts to transform to metadata standard)
to get metadata from other systems using either an xslt somewhere in the
pipeline to convert to the appropriate standard - so effectively you end
up with something like a subtemplate (or component in your terms) of
metadata that can be plugged in to any record. An alternative here is to
use a micro CSW (= metadata-aware WFS in this role)

2. the idea is that the subtemplate of info is referenced via an
identifier from the metadata record (using the id attribute perhaps as
used by Xlinks) and the fields of info from the subtemplate are indexed
for search in Lucene but need not be stored in the metadata record -
which makes the content of the subtemplate slightly easier to keep up to date.

3. there is a role for the GN harvest/proxy manager here to specify,
store and submit the query, schedule updates and keep the Lucene index up to date and possibly/eventually provide a way for the complete record to
be assembled by a remote site that has harvested the record with its id
references.

Don't forget that this thinking is still woolly :slight_smile: and certainly not
original (as you've already noted :-)) and quite a bit needs to be built
in the editor changes planned for GN (particularly Francois' resolver) as well as some kind of simple user interface in the editor to manage this.
There may also be some help for this I suspect in the xforms path being
taken by the LisaSoft guys in the user-centric gui proposal so I'm really interested to hear their thoughts as well.

Cheers,
Simon

==============Original message text===============
On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 7:39:11 +1000 Ted Habermann wrote:

Hello all,

I am renaming this thread from "2.2 release : subtemplates" with the hope of attracting the attention of some of the people that are evolving the GeoNetwork User Interface. My experience suggests that these two concepts might be intimately related.

We have been developing tools for metadata management at NOAA's Data Centers for a number of years and now manage a repository with tens of thousands of FGDC compliant records from several Data Centers and Offices in NOAA. The tool we have been using has a fundamental concept of component records that could be managed separately and referenced from composite records which can contain content as well as component references. We use these components extensively for citations, contacts, on-line resources, instruments, missions, processing, and algorithms, all of which are referenced from many metadata records. This is a clear requirement for us.

We extended this component concept into the user interface by developing what we called "micro-interfaces", task-specific interfaces used outside of the context of the complete metadata record. The idea was that these interfaces would be useful for people that did not understand, or necessarily care about, the metadata standard, but needed to record information (enter metadata) as part of their job.

Seems to me that the initial GeoNetwork editing interface is geared towards editing an entire record (a comprehensive interface). Might be interesting to cast this task in terms of editing components that get held together somehow or brought together somehow in the presentation layer.

I realize that these are not original thoughts, I am just hoping to converge these two threads... I'm sure there are existing resources relevant to this idea. Two obvious ones are the User Centric GUI and Editor Enhancements proposals in the wiki. I apologize in advance for being a bit behind in my reading...

Ted Habermann

--
==== Ted Habermann ===========================
     Enterprise Data Systems Group Leader
     NOAA, National Geophysical Data Center
     V: 303.497.6472 F: 303.497.6513
     "If you want to go quickly, go alone.
     If you want to go far, go together"
     Old Proverb
==== Ted.Habermann@anonymised.com ==================