We will be making some changes to the AGCommons Data Search in the coming months after the launch of the revamped web site. The existing Data Search was created at the beginning of the program to provide a centralized location for spatial metadata discovery and management for AGCommons partner organizations. Now that those organizations are beginning to come on-line, and the Quick Win projects are winding down, its time to leverage the full power of latest Geonetwork Open Source versions. We will continue to develop and maintain GeoNetwork and discover new metadata sources throughout Africa for those organizations who can’t or don’t want to maintain their on catalog infrastructure.
GeoNetwork is a spatial metadata catalog system for finding and accessing data about data. For most people this is an exceedingly dull topic, but one that is absolutely necessary for sharing spatial information on a global scale. GeoNetwork is and has been used as an integral piece of spatial data infrastructure in organizations around the world for several years. And the functionality extends beyond spatial metadata to documents and even soft copy maps. The AGCommons implementation is specifically concerned with access to data for agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa, so our implementation is a bit different.
Firstly our interface is customized to simplify searching. We took out some of the default search options such as search by spatial extent. We also tried to remove as much of the complexity as we could from the front end interface.
As more data is loaded into the AGCommons platform itself we will be connecting the metadata catalog to the data itself hosted by GeoServer or ArcGIS Server to remove the barrier between finding data and freely downloading data. The hope is that through this approach metadata will be discoverable across catalogs as well as by performing geo-searches on Google Maps. We will also being taking some GIS layers and cross posting them to other sites such as GeoCommons by FortiusOne for even wider distribution.
Users are able to rate spatial data by rating the metadata record itself between one and five stars. Each record can be shared via Facebook or other social networking sites. Over time users will define for themselves the most useful datasets to use for analysis.
AGCommons GeoNetwork also exposes the GeoRSS search capabilities available with GeoNetwork. Custom searches can be defined using the API without the need to visit the AGCommons site itself or use the user interface. If another platform would like access to AGCommons data they simply need to write the GeoRSS request.
For example request for maize might return XML. And when viewed in Internet Explorer might look like this:
Stay tuned for more changes to the catalog searches, more robust features and even better performance in the near future!
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