[pycsw-devel] General CSW questions

[Tom Kralidis]

>From: iedwards.pub at gmail.com
>Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 10:03:21 +0100
>To: pycsw-devel at lists.osgeo.org
>Subject: [pycsw-devel] General CSW questions
>
>
>Is there a forum anywhere for generic CSW questions?  I'm new to CSW and pycsw and I have a few up front>questions that I've been unable to find answers to before getting stuck in.
>

fwiw, the OGC Forum exists for generic questions, see http://www.ogcnetwork.net/forum/18 for CSW.

>
>I'm trying to determine whether all transactions can/should take place through the CSW (CSW-T)>interfaces.
>

CSW-T supports the following use cases:

- insert a full metadata record
- update metadata records
 - in full or a specific part of it (queryable, XPath)
 - supports bulk updates using OGC Filter syntax
- delete metadata records
 - supports bulk deletes using OGC Filter syntax
- harvesting disparate metadata

>I'm interested in:a) accessing change log (revision history) of metadata records - including who made>changes, date/time of modification etc.
>

This is not supported in CSW-T per se, however some metadata management environments probably support this (I'm thinking GeoNetwork).

The GeoNode project (http://geonode.org), which is powered by pycsw, is experimenting with GeoGit (http://geogit.org) for data/metadata, but I'm not sure how mature this is yet.



>
>b) high granularity of access control, e.g. anyone can edit DC fields in a metadata record, but only>designated people can edit the custom "approved" or "authorized" fields in the same record.

This is out of scope for CSW-T, as authentication mechanisms are left to the implementation.  Having said this, I haven't seen this level of granularity out there.

>
>c) can database migrations be managed for evolving the structure of metadata records? (changes to>database schema in repeatable and consistent ways).


Not CSW-T per se, however implementations certainly deal with this.  GeoNode  includes a metadata management environment and metadata migrations are made possible using South.

Hope this helps.