[OSGeodata] Re: [Geotools-devel] On the catalog tutorial

[Jo Walsh]

dear Jody, Adrian, thanks for this startling level of Java API detail. 

On Sun, Sep 24, 2006 at 03:38:59PM -0700, Jody Garnett wrote:
> Do we have a link?
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/CatalogAPI 
http://geotools.codehaus.org/Catalog+Tutorial

> Let me try an "intro"...
Okay let me try to boil this down to novice level. 
 
GeoTools has a Catalog abstraction. This can point to a remote or local
Service. A Service offers an interface through to GeoStuffOfSomeKind.
This can be an OWS but also an SLD resource or some metadata service.
Inside Service you do the lifting (via GeoAPI?); model / protocol are
abstracted away from the happy uDig user- CSW, OWSCat, OAI-PMH, you don't mind.
Then you have your own ServiceInfo/GeoResourceInfo internal model 
which is a Dublin Core based reduced geometadata subset. 

- How is the local catalog built? From usage? Can it be externalised?
  E.g. posted to a remote indexing service? Would this be actually useful?
 
> Also used to go to other interfaces
> - ServiceInfo (for dublin core metadata), morph to any metadata 
> interface you got coded up

http://udig.refractions.net/docs/api-geotools/org/geotools/catalog/defaults/DefaultGeoResourceInfo.html
Okay this is becoming clearer. What I have been trying to implement on
the server/broker side looks a lot like GeoResource, the OSGeo draft
metadata model like GeoResourceInfo and what Tom wants for OWSCat more
like ServiceInfo. It is great that you have all this going on the
client side, I want to be able to syndicate it though.

k thanks,


jo