[GeoNetwork-users] Evaluation of metadata tools

Dear Paul,
I received your recent very interesting presentation on metadata tool comparison through Yola and would like to provide some additional feedback to allow you to correct the evaluation of the GeoNetwork tool that I am responsible for in FAO.

I have taken your matrix and will list my comments below:

- Profile creation: Supported through the online editor, allowing to create templates with or without pre-filled content. Supported by adding custom XSD schema's for custom profiles (several initiatives have already done this for for example the French profile, German profile, Australian marine profile and I or others could list more)

- Schema validation: Supported. The current version (2.0) supports XSD validation. Version 2.1 will also support the additional content validation, allowing to both validate structure and content.

- Languages supported: Language independent. Current translations are a.o. English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, German and others like Czech and Hungarian.

- Supported standards: Dublin Core, FGDC, ISO19115 (all in version 2.0). In version 2.1 also ISO19115 based on the ISO19139 implementation standard is supported. Others can be added.

- Entity / element extensibility: Through custom profiles, extensions can be included. The standards supported are independent from the application's business logic.

- Thesauri, code lists and defaults:
  - thesauri have been added into version 2.1. You can import a thesaurus through the web administration interface and use it both in the editor and in the search
  - code lists are provided in the editor forms in human readable form
  - defaults can be set using the metadata template system
  - calendars are used to ensure dates are inserted in compliance with ISO standard 8601

In addition, we are working on extensions that allow you to directly import and export metadata generated in a range of applications.
  This includes:
    - ArcCatalog created metadata and data that can be directly exported and imported from ArcCatalog (using a tool in ArcCatalog) into GeoNetwork opensource. This includes thumbnail and data export support.
    - Direct import & export of ArcCatalog XML metadata into GeoNetwork through the web interface (both ISO19115 and FGDC metadata)
    - A stand alone Windows based metadata editor that extracts geospatial properties from the data set and generates ISO19115 metadata that can be directly inserted into the web based catalog.
    - the gvSIG project is adding a metadata editor that directly inserts metadata into GeoNetwork. gvSIG can also search GeoNetwork catalogs directly.

  I also missed a notion on supported Catalog standards supported to allow catalogs and clients to interact and create an SDI network. GeoNetwork supports both OGC-CAT 1 (Z39.50) and CSW 2.0.2 (as the open source reference implementation for the OGC standard). It also uses it's own (open but not standard) protocol for harvesting. We are planning to add OAI server support in collaboration with UNEP.

If you need any other background, please feel free to contact me or others in the community. This type of evaluations is very valuable to us to ensure we develop the GeoNetwork system in a way that matches/ fulfills requirements from the large group of users.

Again, thanks for the work and greetings from Rome,
Jeroen

_______________________
Jeroen Ticheler
FAO-UN
Tel: +39 06 57056041
http://www.fao.org/geonetwork
42.07420°N 12.34343°E