I post this message in order to express some needs about the way a peculiar kind of resources, maps for instance, may be used by one of the GeoNetwork-UI apps : DataHub. One of my customers (Région Hauts-de-France) intend to deploy this software as the frontend for its catalogue of maps (digital maps not hard copy maps).
Map is a type of resource that one can reference in GeoNetwork for a long time but in a way that is far from being ideal when ISO19115 is used for the metadata model: this standard assumes a map is just a kind of dataset. The only specific property that may be used to clearly indicate a resource is a map is “presentationForm” with “mapDigital” and “mapHardcopy” values.
The distinction between static and interactive maps is done by GeoNetwork during indexation by analyzing some other properties (distributionFormat and transferOptions for instance): see core-geonetwork/schemas/iso19139/src/main/plugin/iso19139/index-fields/index.xsl at main · geonetwork/core-geonetwork · GitHub. The rules used there are quite outdated, especially the use of OGC:OWS-C and OGC:WMC: they were discussed in 2013 (see #1250 (ISO19139 / Improve support for making metadata on maps) – GeoNetwork opensource Developer website).
As of GeoNetwork 4.4.6 (see Map / Save your map improvements by fxprunayre · Pull Request #8155 · geonetwork/core-geonetwork · GitHub), maps are not treated any more at the same time as datasets and maps (which was the case before this release). They are now indexed as maps even if their hierarchy level is “dataset”. This is fine for me (I imagine a map is not a dataset for most users).
In the first version of the DataHub, only resources tagged as datasets were available in search results. I don’t know if it is still the case. I hope this is not the case anymore or, at least, this will change soon in order to be able to find maps in the DataHub search results (since maps are no longer datasets in the Elasticsearch index).
This would be great if, during the next codesprint, the way maps described using ISO19115 metadata model could be discussed in order that they could be handled properly by the DataHub.
Thank you very much.
[my apologies for the quality of my English - no AI used to produce it]