[Geodata] OSgeo Catalogue

[Jo Walsh]

dear Lorenzo,

On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 06:48:42PM +0200, Lorenzo Becchi wrote:
> I've seen there are some WMS services from Spanish and Italian public 
> institutions that I would like to contribute to OSGeo Catalogue.
> actually I don't find the public URL and I don't know how could I 
> contribute (admin access, other ways?).

This is because the OSGeo catalogue, as such, doesn't really exist ;) 
There are multiple approaches which have been partially taken, 
e.g. the from-scratch structure-driven interface with GeoDjango, or
the approach of adding structure and semantics incrementally from an
existing source (e.g. the semantic mediawiki version).

There have also been some experiments with GeoNetwork but it is not
ideal when all one wants to do is drop in a URL or, say, an RSS feed
with a list of different URLs of WMS's. The question came up at least
once, what is the best way to annotate WMS and WFS resources in Dublin
Core based metadata documents/models. 

I hope to get a "spike" out soon of a simple web-based catalogue
service - something just a bit more complicated than
http://www.ckan.net/ - i know i have been making noises like this
awhile! :/

It seems a crazy simple problem not to have solved yet, for me this
has been because the solution is too generic and i keep drifting off
into different use cases for the same backend metadata model. 
(tracking a tilecache, indexing a filesystem, etc... )

If you are interested in helping out - it would be good to at least
try this semantic mediawiki plugin and see what can be got out of it -
come hang out on the #telascience channel on freenode. 

cheers,


jo
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