The USGIN Metadata Wizard is a metadata format agnostic web tool for creating, managing, and exporting new metadata records. This Drupal based service was conceived as a means to lowering the brier to metadata creation for those who are not able or willing to become proficient with metadata standards and informatics. The tool is based on a format agnostic metadata model which then can be exported into multiple metadata standards.

Following is how we modified the Views Bonus Pack module for Drupal 6 to generate ISO 19139 XML metadata files for the USGIN Document Repository. This hack can be be used to relatively easily generate other XML metadata (FGDC, CSW records) or most complex XML. Ideally, this hack will evolve into a separate module. If you are interested or have questions, please participate in the Generate ISO 19139 metadata record XML files Views Bonus Pack issue thread.

Overview

The goal is to generate minimum ISO 19139 dataset metadata XML files (that conform to the USGIN profile) from the core and CCK fields used in the repository's Collection (ct_collection) and Document-like Information Object (DLIO, ct_dlio) content types.

Files: 

Patch for Views Bonus Pack 6.x-dev (CVS trunk)

Following are the two Drupal 6 content types that define the USGIN Document Repository (you may want to familiarize yourself with general Drupal concepts):

Collection (ct_collection)

The Collection content type acts as an arbitrary logical unit (or container) that groups the Document-like Information Object (DLIO) nodes which hold the actual data resource. At this time, Collections fulfill 3 objectives at once. Perhaps, they need to be separated at a later point.

Following is a break-down of the Drupal 6 modules used in the USGIN Document Repository site (you may want to familiarize yourself with general Drupal concepts):

We recently struggled through figuring out how to make Drupal run on a Windows Server 2008 machine that was running IIS. Every Drupal site that we had dealt with prior to this was hosted on a Linux machine running Apache, MySQL and PHP, and so we needed to figure out what could be done differently to make it work on our in-house server, which was already running a production instance of ArcGIS Server under IIS7.

From the outset, we had two options:

We just finished putting together a Drupal based Document Repository site (http://repository.usgin.org) as a testbed and as an alternative for other Repository systems such as DSpace. The goal was to fulfilled the following requirements in a ca. 2 week development period (200+ man hours):

Discuss ways to bend the Drupal content management system to your needs.