[GeoNode-users] Integration with existing mapserver and associated metadata

[Tom Kralidis]

Hi Margherita:

On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 5:22 AM, Margherita Di Leo <diregola at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi again,
> Second issue that I encountered is the following. In our system
> infrastructure, the data are served by Mapserver, and this is not going to
> change. Introducing GeoNode, however, we want also to introduce the
> possibility to selected users to publish their data through the
> infrastructure exploiting the capabilities of GeoNode, so geoserver as well.

aside: note that there has been various discussion over the years about making
GeoNode's OWS server backend pluggable, so that one can swap
out GeoServer for MapServer or something else.  Sounds like this would fit
your use case.  I think this is worth investigating in the future.

> And of course we want this to be as seameless as possible. To do this, we
> thought to deploy data from Mapserver via web service in Geonode. But the
> blocker here is how to deal with metadata associated to the maps stored in
> mapserver.

Can you clarify here?  What do you mean by maps stored in MapServer?
Assuming an OWS endpoint, GeoNode can harvest the service and it's
underlying contents (WMS=layers, WFS=featuretypes, WCS=coverages).

> I saw that in Geonode the way to load the metadata is one by one
> simultaneously with each map. This won't work for our case. What do you
> suggest in this case? Should I create a separate instance of pycsw and
> harvest it from the geonode catalogue? would the catalogue maintain the same
> capabilities seamlessly?
> Any pointers appreciated
> Thanks
>
> --
> Margherita Di Leo