Dear geonetwork and geoserver developers, This email is cross-posted to both lists since I think it concerns both projects, I hope people do not mind cross-posting, if so, I apologize beforehand.
Lately I have been walking around with the idea to setup a geodata sharing portal for a couple of NGO's in a natureconservation project. Right now this project would only encompass use by a few NGO's, but I have also had the idea of setting something similar up for use by individuals and NGO's in general. Geonetwork and geoserver, combined with PostGIS come in very well in this project. Geonetwork is great in searching through and recording metadata and geoserver is great at providing access to the actual data. For storing new geodatasets (not metadata) though, geonetwork has limited functionality in the form of uploading files and linking to sources with the metadata, and geoserver provides this functionality (as far as I can see) with a server/data administrator in mind who will setup the dataset, tables, etc. What I was looking for, and did not find, was a more user oriented way to upload geodata (zipped gml/shp/geotiff/kml files, etc) which is then converted to and stored in a common backend (postgis/file based), together with it's metadata. My first question is: Am i overlooking functionality provided by either geoserver or geonetwork? I was discussing this with Tyler Mitchell and wildintellect (a.k.a. Alex) on the #osgeo irc channel. Tyler told me he was thinking of developing this type of application and mentioned a concern he already addressed: Apart from the normal metadata as defined in the ISO standards supported by geonetwork, he also wanted to quickly access more data oriented metadata like number of layers, srs, type of features, number of features, etc. Tyler already wrote a python script which reads datasets through OGR/GDAL and stores this kind of data in an xml file (see http://spatialguru.com/ideas/data_cataloguing_background and http://spatialguru.com/code/xml_catalogue_format). My idea now is to extend on that script to provide a python interface which can be tied to any frontend (webbased or other) to upload and store geodata in a common backend, and generate the xml file for storage somewhere as well. Tyler and wildintellect were interested in this for inclusion in other python based webapplications. I on the other hand would like to use geonetwork and geoserver and would prefer such functionality to be provided from the webinterface of either of them and combined with their own functionality. I thought of a solution to this problem since both are written in java: Jython has a compiler which allows python code to be compiled to java bytecode which can be used in any java app. My second question is: would either of your projects consider including java bytecode which was generated from the jython compiler and written in python, as a plugin or in the base application which provides this functionality, and would you then like a contribution to your projects in the form of additions in the interface which leverages this functionality? I would be very happy to invest time in doing both the development of the python part and also contributing directly to geoserver or geonetwork. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and opinions. Cheers, Dolf Andringa. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now for Creativity and Technology (CaT), June 3rd, NYC. CaT is a gathering of tech-side developers & brand creativity professionals. Meet the minds behind Google Creative Lab, Visual Complexity, Processing, & iPhoneDevCamp as they present alongside digital heavyweights like Barbarian Group, R/GA, & Big Spaceship. http://p.sf.net/sfu/creativitycat-com _______________________________________________ Geoserver-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geoserver-devel
