[Qgis-developer] search and catalog tool

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 8:51 AM, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
> Il giorno mar, 05/04/2011 alle 09.23 +0200, Tim Sutton ha scritto:
>
>> The pieces for such functionality are coming together and I think it
>> wont be long before we have a robust catalogue tool for QGIS.
>
> Great news. Could you  please let us know more about the project? Which
> metadata standard will the catalogue use?
> All the best.

 I don't see why a catalog index would use a particular standard, it
would just enable searches in the metadata held by data sources
according to the standards they may be using. So for a GDAL dataset,
it would just call g.GetMetadata_List() (I think) and stash the
returned text in its db. This would then be indexed and searchable.
The catalog tool itself is then neutral about metadata schema.

 I guess if the layer presents a well-known metadata scheme then it
can do what Voyager does:

http://voyagergis.com/doc/current/Show%20Metadata

 I think its too much of a task to expect a catalog tool to collate
all possible layers metadata into a single schema, although it could
expose a summary metadata of the simple stuff like extent, projection
etc for the layers in the catalog.

 I was thinking a catalog database could be a spatialite database,
with each layer a rectangular polygon, easily enabling spatial and
non-spatial searches...

Barry