Something’s gotta give.<\/p>\n
There has been so much discussion on the idea of geospatial catalogs\/registries\/repositories\/searching\/[insert_buzzword_here] in the last little while that it’s impossible not to see the sore thumb that it has become within the community.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Discussions: Paul Ramsey has offered his experiences on this on his blog in October 2005<\/a>, then again in February 2006<\/a>. The Digital Earth Weblog<\/a> also discussed<\/a> this recently. I won’t get into the specifics of the discussions except to say that everyone agrees we need a simple catalog API\/solution for the community. A lack of solid implementations and discussion about catalog profiles has gotten us to where we are at this point.<\/p>\n Implementations: The Geospatial One Stop (GOS) portal<\/a> provides a CS-W currently. So does a prototype from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Refractions has done some brave work in scraping Google to populate a catalog they implemented for uDig<\/a>. owscat<\/a> has been deployed in the ResEau <\/a>portal as well as a UN Water <\/a>prototype. GeoNetwork Opensource<\/a> and deegree2 <\/a>both promise CS-W implementations. And this is not to mention the barrage of ad hoc APIs out there already attempting to do the same thing.<\/p>\n Now, OSGEO <\/a>is picking up some steam on this trail. The Geodata group is looking at requirements in defining metadata and a catalog (see their wiki). Many approaches are being reviewed, such as CS-W, pure OGC:WFS, and OAI-PMH<\/a>, which is the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting 2.0. This one is new for me, but certainly worth a look.<\/p>\n Hopefully these activities can somehow be unified, at least at the API level, for interoperability and federated peering. In my mind, the main goal would a simple catalog, with a “publish-once” approach for data and service providers, and the ability for lightweight clients to implement against. Seems to me like this would be a viable resource in the GeoWeb 2.0 paradigm<\/a>, eh?<\/p>\n\n\n