[ckan-dev] CSW, ISO and Spatial Extension

Thu Oct 25 16:50:58 UTC 2012

Hi!

I'm in the process of evaluating CKAN's potential for use in a distributed data system for geothermal information that is being built in the US. A fundamental component of our project is the concept of a catalog which contains standardized metadata describing distributed data resources across the web. At that level, CKAN seems like a very nice fit!

We are committed to providing metadata according to a custom profile for ISO 19139, and to implementing a CSW interface. I've started by playing with the spatial, harvest, and csw extensions, which are clearly undergoing significant development currently -- I see that they've all been merged into one extension as of last week! What I found was that while the CSW interface responds to queries, it does not expose any of the resources that I had published in my development environment -- GetRecords and GetRecordByID never return anything.

While I'm new to SQLalchemy, spatial.controllers.csw:GetRecords looks to me like it is configured to only return records that were brought into the catalog via a harvest mechanism. Is this true?

If so, that brings up what I suspect is the primary issue I would have to deal with in order to implement CKAN -- I suspect that there would need to be a mapping from CKAN's "internal metadata model" (basically the package table) into XML records that can be exposed via CSW. It is also likely that in order to generate a complete ISO 19139 record might require some additional content in the internal model.

Does this sound like I'm on the right track? Is there any existing pattern for doing this kind of translation where I might start looking for guidance?

Thanks!
____________________

Ryan Clark
ryan.clark at azgs.az.gov
(520) 302-4871

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