[Geodata] meeting narrative

[Jo Walsh]

dear Jeroen,

I've read about MEF in the geonetwork server reference, but confess i
skipped over it, seeing it as something for internal use only. 

On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 12:42:39AM +0200, Jeroen Ticheler wrote:
> We're working on packaging data and metadata that than can be  
> directly imported in e.g. a GeoNetwork catalog. We've defined a  
> packaging format, very light weight, that contains some meta-meta  
> information, the actual metadata, preview images, basic privileges  

This makes a lot of sense up to "basic privileges". Can you expand
this? Are you using the MEF to pass user credentials between 
geonetwork instances? Or do you mean more like license constraints?

> We're also discussing with the gvSIG folks to develop a bot that will  
> search a directory, generate metadata and create MEF files that can  
> than be harvested by GN

So gvSIG will consume these data packages, and emit them.
When you say, 'then be harvested', what interface are you using?
Will this become the 'best' way to submit metadata to a GN node via a
machine interface? 

> The format is not the solution to everything, but for our cases it  
> works. It's been described in our documentation and we're open to  
> further improve/extent it.

It is great to see something in this space emerge from succesful usage :)

> Maybe something to consider for the data dump bucket!?

Definitely, especially if more clients are consuming the format by
then. What's holding you back from socialising this more, e.g. to uDig
or QGIS - waiting for proof of concept first? or more data out there? 

cheers, 


jo