OSGeodata] discovery requirements

Stefan F. Keller sfkeller at gmail.com
Fri Aug 4 19:15:43 EDT 2006


Tom Kralidis wrote Friday, August 04, 2006 3:23 PM
> Following the discussions on cataloguing, it may be a good idea outline
> what we would want a catalogue to do.
>
> 1./ discover the existence of a web service
> 2./ discover the existence of a resource which is available via web
>     services (i.e WMS layer, WFS feature type)
> 3./ discover the existence of a static resource (dataset, document,
>     etc.)
> 4./ ability to performs operations 1 - 3 with spatial, aspatial and
>     temporal predicates
> 5./ provide a RESTful request API
> 6./ provide responses in XML

To me it's all this except perhaps 4. because the operations should
concentrate on (incremental) 'harvesting' rather than distributed online
querying. Security, as Norman Barker suggested, is solved otherwise and has
been discussed in debates about RESTful services and security.

Having said that: I speak about 'search service' and to me such a web
service has to important 'interfaces' one to the user and a programmatic one
to the internet (besides internal persistence layers etc.).

Paul and others strongly emphasized to start with the focus on what users
are probably looking for. To me they look for decisions and want to have
access to information which is spatially related (sic: 'Open Access' and
OAI). They are not looking for data per se and also not for services but for
the map information behind them.

On the other hand we have spatial data providers as well as a community,
like us (not actually the same as the data providers) who calls for open and
better access to this geodata. What seems now crucial, is what have the
geodata providers to do such that their information can be 'discovered' and
hopefully bound automatically to users seeking geospatial decisions.

So to me the big challenge is now, to define what minimal information data
providers should document as metadata and how they could publish it, so that
spiders and registries can find, register and publish it as catalogues,
specialized search engines for the deep web or build in geodata discovery
components (as p.ex. in uDig).

-- Stefan

BTW: I could transfer my stuff here
http://www.geometa.info/rappiinfo/wiki/index.php/OSGeodata
to http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Metadata_Requirements#Discovery(but
I would open an extra page there)?
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