Sorry for the delayed response. Mainly, yes the categories are not in the metadata and they are groupings of high interest to our user base. While the category could be added to each record, since we also harvest records, it is much cleaner not to edit the harvested material(s) but to have a separate category for GN to pull in a group of records that fit that general topic. It also allows us to do that in a batch -- if I didn't have the categories, I would need to add a new term to each metadata record one by one. In other words, if I harvest 50 new records, I can quickly group them and then batch add my categories.
It is similar to a librarian grouping library books by a topic so that the user can browse the shelves to find related materials without having to go through and search specific terms or titles. It also allows us to easily modify the categories as interests change. In addition the keywords within the metadata are using specific thesauri related to the scientific community, the categories allow a less rigid assignment of non-ISO terminology that fits our user community.
What I would like to see ultimately as a feature is to be able to batch update categories without it overwriting the existing one(s). The way it works right now is if I have 'beach' and 'invasive species' on a group of records and I want to batch add 'nearshore' to some of them, it takes away my initial categories. I'd like to be able to add the new category(s) leaving the old in place in a batch feature.
Kathy
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul van Genuchten [mailto:paul.vangenuchten@anonymised.com]
Sent: Friday, February 13, 2015 4:47 PM
To: Kathy Koch; Geonetwork-Users@anonymised.com
Subject: Re: [GeoNetwork-users] Category / Good defaults
Hi Kathy, thanx for sharing your experience with categories. Your list of categories is quite divers, it has thematic keywords like beaches/climatology and hierarchylevel-like items like models.
Can I ask you what are you using the categories for? I guess you know these categories are not available in your metadata, so you probably add similar concepts in your metadata as hierarchylevel, keyword or topiccategory?
Doesn't it feel redundant to you to have two places to manage similar concepts? And wouldn't you be able to use the metadata-information itself to get a similar result as you have now with categories? I'm just wondering how people use categories.
Personally I do see a usage of having codelists like "categories" in geonetwork. That is if we would map geonetwork-codelist-values to schema-specific codelists. It will enable us to set categories automatically from metadata content and suggest things like keywords and topic categories while users are editing the metadata and allow to suggest related content when users are browsing the catalogue.
Hope to hear from you, bye Paul.
Kathy Koch schreef op 13-2-2015 om 21:57:
The generic categories were not useful for us, so we added totally different ones specific to our usage requirements (e.g. beaches, climatology, models, etc.).
I did like having the default set and being able to modify or get rid of what I needed and the process was relatively simple as it is.
I suppose if you want to keep things more generic, keep the base categories you have but just make it a bulleted list instead of worrying about icons (although I did have a fun few moments dreaming up icons that fit my categories). And yes, good instructions for how to make changes.
Kathy