Introduction

I'm relatively new to Django, and maybe to servers in general, but setting up Django is a chore. Or at least figuring out how to set it up is. There is no installer. You have to have a pretty good understanding of how your HTTP server (IIS, Apache, whatever) works before you're going to be able to get anywhere. Then you'll have to know how to set up quite a few ancillary applications (e.g. Python, WSGI, FastCGI, Flup, MySQL, PostgreSQL). The details of which other applications you want to set up depend entirely on the evironment you're building - so that means it is a little different every time - and that means it is pretty hard to write one single "walkthrough" for how you should do it.

What I want to do here is detail my setup, and along the way make some suggestions about what seems to make things easier. So here goes:

Suggestion: Use Ubuntu (Most recent stable version, always.)

I say this because that apt system really makes installations a breeze. I fumbled for a while to try and setup WSGI (a module for Apache) to work on my Windows machine, to no avail. In Ubuntu it is so easy:

By default, metadata records that are harvested into the Geoportal are not editable. This includes any records in the Geoportal that were not created explicitly with interface provided by the web application ("Use dedicated editor to create metadata manually"). The SQL below creates a database trigger that allows harvested records to be edited.

Be aware that there is the potential for a lossy data translation when you do this. The harvested record is completely rewritten using the schema definitions that your Geoportal implements. If the original harvested record has any data that is not included in your schema implementation, that data will be lost after the original is edited. Another way to put that is, if you edit a harvested record, the edited version will only contain information that you see in the editor interface. If the original started with anything else in it, that will be lost.

Now that we have a better grasp of the IT and informatics challenges of a distributed and interoperable information network, we can think more again about its adoption - how to make it work and useful on the ground. Following was our rough chain of thought on metadata:

This setup guide for downloading GeoNetwork using Subversion, building using Maven 2, developing, deploying and debugging on Tomcat and Eclipse on Windows 7 64-bit still uses the MckoiDB and should be updated to use MySQL.

Introduction

This document was developed for GeoNetwork’s new Maven 2 based setup. See http://trac.osgeo.org/geonetwork/wiki/Maven for more information.

Note that several installation and configuration options may not be necessary for GeoNetwork development but can be necessary for other software development projects.

This document was compiled from experiments, notes, and web sites by the following contributors and sources (in alphabetical order):

I posted an example of the <typeMappings> section of a GeoServer/app-schema mapping file here: A Sample GeoServer Mapping file for NCGMP09 to GeoSciML. Checkout this other post to see where your mapping file should be, and how your datastore will refer to it: GeoServer Complex-Feature WFS Configuration: Directory Structure.

The <typeMappings> section is where you indicate what fields in your source data (NCGMP09) go into which fields in your output data (GeoSciML). Here I want to describe the different levels of complexity you can undergo when making a mapping file.

The Simplest Case: From one Field to Another

GeoNetwork offers a harvest service that, among other, follows a OGC WMS or WFS GetCapabilities URL and transforms the response into an ISO 19139 metadata record. Bear in mind that the resulting ISO metadata record is only as good as the GetCapabilities response and that the metadata can never be entirely ISO 19139 conformant without dummy values due to limitations of the OGC GetCapabilities schema.

GeoNetwork offers a handy user interface to add those "GeoNetwork Harvesting Nodes" and also exposes their functionality through a even handier XML service. See chapter 19.3 on "Harvesting Services" of the GeoNetwork opensource V 2.4 The Complete Manual. Following are my notes on creating an OGC harvesting node through GeoNetwork's harvesting service.

This is an example Python script that showcases the creation of GeoNetwork Metadata Exchange Format 1.1 (MEF) archives from ISO 19139 metadata XML files.It has been tested in Windows XP and Python 2.6.

USGIN CatalogConnector test client http://catalog.usgin.org/catalogConnector/ (version 0.5)

This promising, stand-alone, Java-based, CSW web client is currently being developed by SDI Catalonia (IDEC) and USGIN at http://sourceforge.net/projects/catalogconnecto/

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: