easy CSW with eXcat

If you have existing metadata and simply want a CSW interface as a means to search and discover your geospatial metadata, eXcat provides a simple solution.  Following the installation steps, it’s quite simple to populate your CSW:

$ cd excat/csw/WEB-INF/harvest
$ tar zxf my_metadata_files.tgz
$ for i in *.xml
> do
> lwp-download "http://localhost/excat/csw?request=Harvest&service=CSW&\
> version=2.0.2\&namespace=xmlns(csw=http://www.opengis.net/cat/csw)&\
> source=$i&resourceFormat=application/xml\
> &resourceType=http://www.isotc211.org/2005/gmd"
> done

That’s pretty much it.  Lightweight simple approach, particularly for those who already have metadata management tools in place and need CSW.

/me thinks it would be nice to have a Python port of this for those in Java-less environments (why does it seem most CSW server implementations are in Java?)

Written from home:

3 Comments so far »

  1. Dave Sampson said,

    Wrote on March 15, 2010 @ 15:53:49

    Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Windows XP

    I’ll have to check out this little tool.

    One issue I have is that I have lots of FGDC metadta records I want to get into ISO. Without getting into the whole XSLT realm I wonder if another catalogue say GeoNetwork could harvest from this catalogue to alolow for transformation along the way.

    Either way, this would be a pretty easy way for people without catalogues to set one up.

    +1 for python implementation.

    Posted from Canada Canada
    Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Windows XP
  2. tomkralidis said,

    Wrote on March 15, 2010 @ 21:21:07

    Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Mac OS X

    @Dave: I don’t see any FGDC -> ISO stylesheets in GN. AFAIK, ISO has constructs that FGDC doesn’t, so conversion is not as straight forward. GN stores the full metadata record in the underlying data model as is (see metadata table, data column), as opposed to putting content into various tables/columns.

    That said, you can check out resources like http://www.cits.rncan.gc.ca/html/brodeurj/.protege/.napMetadata/library/presentations/MigratingFGDCMetadata2ISO_BWslides.ppt and http://www.fgdc.gov/metadata/geospatial-metadata-standards for more info.

    As well, you could look into how the original FGDC metadata was created (say from a DB) and go back to the DB proper to marshall ISO output from there.

    Posted from Canada Canada
    Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Mac OS X
  3. Dave Sampson said,

    Wrote on March 16, 2010 @ 09:34:57

    Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Windows XP

    Thanks for the suggestions.

    Posted from Canada Canada
    Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Windows XP

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Modified: 14 March 2010 21:57:30 EST