Hi Jeroen,
Thanks for the response. I usually find open source lists very responsive
and this seems to be no exception. I must have put forward some difficult
questions and hence the delay. ;--) I look forward to Andrea's responses.
We have tried to load GeoNetwork into our Oracle database. We didn't have
much luck but we are still going through the list archives and have yet to
try some of those suggestions. If we can't get it going we may come back to
this list for help.
Meanwhile, we loaded GeoNetwork with the default McKoi database so that I
could determine its capabilities. Hence my previous email. I have been
trying for a while to find a tool that will allow us to create valid ISO
19139 metadata and that has the flexibility to allow ISO 19115 profiles.
GeoNetwork looks to have the potential because, being open source, the
developers are more likely to listen to suggestions. [You have already
proved this. ;--) ]
The potential of ISO 19115 is staggering, if one considers the discovery of
data, interoperability and data management. There are other uses but I won't
discuss them here. I am worried that the community will give it only one
chance to decide if it will be adopted or not. A poor implementation may
send it down a path of being a good idea but not used. We have all seen that
happen I'm sure. ;--)
Our organisation has over 750 Terabytes of data to document. I don't think
that metadata is *that* exciting to expect people to fill out the metadata
for all that data. ;--) So it is important that we automatically generate as
much of the metadata content as possible. Inheritance will play a big factor
in this respect. The more detailed the level of metadata, eg. attributes and
features, the more content can be inherited from the parent metadata, eg. the
datasets, series, featureTypes and attributeTypes. Furthermore, at this
level, the information that can't be inherited can usually be automatically
generated from the data. That will greatly reduce the human resources put
into generating metadata but greatly increase the amount of metadata being
generated. That will allow interoperability to be implemented more easily
into our organisation and I can't see how this is *not* the same situation
for other organisations if they also have large data repositories.
Our organisation's developers understand Oracle and probably don't want to
learn McKoi. ;--) If we can manipulate the Oracle GeoNetwork components then
we are more likely to succeed in implementing ISO 19115 and hence
interoperability. We need to be able to map the content of our data to the
metadata content for our different data types and repositories. We don't
expect this from GeoNetwork but it is important that we can access the XML
object(?) and manipulate it outside of the GeoNetwork tool. We could
probably more easily integrate with GeoNetwork if the metadata management
component was available as a web service. We will find out more once we get
GeoNetwork set up with the Oracle RDBMS. ;--)
I know that you don't need to hear all this but I thought I would mention it
to show why I stated the user requirements in my previous email and why I
feel ISO 19115 metadata is important to all organisations.
Thank you for your time and I greatly appreciate your interest. I'm looking
forward to testing the beta versions that you mention. I have explicit
interests and will concentrate on those. Others in my organisation have
other interests and they may participate in discussions after loading the
beta versions and getting their hands dirty. ;--)
Thanks again.
John
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeroen Ticheler [mailto:Jeroen.Ticheler@anonymised.com]
Sent: Friday, 19 May 2006 1:05 AM
To: Hockaday John
Cc: geonetwork-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Geonetwork-devel] Validation of XML against ISO
19139 XSDs and other ISO 19115 rulesHi John,
Sorry for the late response. You email is very to the point and much
appreciated! We need some time to study parts of it. I add a
reply to
the first trivial questionAndrea is answering the discussion
items now too.
Thanks again!
JeroenOn May 18, 2006, at 3:50 AM, John.Hockaday@anonymised.com wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am new to GeoNetwork. I sent this email to the GeoNetwork users
> list but
> received no replies so I am sending it to the developers list.
> This email
> describes essential user requirements that need to be part of the
> development
> for GeoNetwork to correctly implement ISO 19115 and
relevant profiles.
>
> I have been following the development of the ISO 19139 XSDs and
> noticed that
> the "final" XSDs are available from
> http://eden.ign.fr/xsd/isotc211/index_html?set_language=en&cl=en I
> have
> downloaded these XSDs and validated them using Xerces-J and full-
> schema
> checking. I have also noticed that GeoNetwork is using a very old
> format for
> the XML that it generates for the ISO 19115 metadata.Yes, we use the DTD that was available for the final draft. Now
Andrea has finished implementing an XSLT to transform that into an
ISO19139 compliant metadata correcting the errors from the original
structure. GeoNetwork will have that conversion as part of its
migration path when upgrading from one to a next version. So version
GN 2.0 will be converted into 19139 structure when migrating to
GeoNetwork 2.1 that is scheduled for release in September. First
alpha releases will come out within 2 or 3 weeks. We use the latest
schemas you refer to above.>
> In 2006-05-02 Jeroen Ticheler mentions:
>
> ...
... Other information deleted.
John Hockaday
Geoscience Australia
GPO Box 378
Canberra ACT 2601
(02) 6249 9735
http://www.ga.gov.au/
john.hockaday\@ga.gov.au