Metadata workflow, history and draft in GeoNetwork
This is a modal window.
The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported.
Formal Metadata
| Title |
| |
| Title of Series | ||
| Number of Parts | 295 | |
| Author | ||
| Contributors | ||
| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Germany: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/43432 (DOI) | |
| Publisher | ||
| Release Date | ||
| Language |
Content Metadata
| Subject Area | ||
| Genre | ||
| Abstract |
| |
| Keywords |
FOSS4G Bucharest 2019152 / 295
15
20
28
32
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
46
48
52
54
57
69
72
75
83
85
87
88
101
103
105
106
108
111
114
119
122
123
126
129
130
131
132
137
139
140
141
142
143
144
147
148
149
155
157
159
163
166
170
171
179
189
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
202
207
212
213
214
215
216
231
235
251
252
263
287
00:00
MetadataSoftwareGoodness of fitPresentation of a groupFocus (optics)Computer animation
00:37
Functional (mathematics)Open sourceMetadataExistenceSoftwarePresentation of a groupCASE <Informatik>GeometryBookmark (World Wide Web)InternetworkingProduct (business)Source code
01:51
Term (mathematics)EmailComputer wormDemosceneSource codeSpatial data infrastructureLibrary catalogAxiom of choiceSoftware developerWeb portalService (economics)Standard deviationMetadataVariety (linguistics)Intrusion detection systemContent (media)FreewareFile archiverGoodness of fitMultiplication signProcess (computing)InformationContent (media)Set (mathematics)Open sourcePhysical lawOrder (biology)WebsiteProduct (business)Source codeProjective planeVariety (linguistics)2 (number)Data managementDigital photographyWeb pageLibrary catalogComputer clusterService (economics)Software developerSoftwareStandard deviationRow (database)Home pageMetadataGeometryComputer animation
04:05
MetadataControl flowMetadataContent (media)Computer animation
04:24
Library catalogControl flowProcedural programmingLevel (video gaming)Sampling (statistics)Type theoryResultantSet (mathematics)Goodness of fitComputer animation
04:49
Control flowGeometrySoftwareService (economics)InformationComputer animation
05:08
Text editorData managementDemosceneProjective planeText editorGeometrySinc functionComputer animation
05:35
Text editorLatent heatContent (media)Functional (mathematics)Content management systemProcess (computing)Self-organizationGeometrySet (mathematics)Point (geometry)SoftwareData managementStandard deviationContext awarenessSoftware developerNumbering schemeProduct (business)View (database)Observational studyThermal conductivityOffice suiteComputer animation
06:39
MetadataRow (database)Text editorLatent heatRevision controlPairwise comparisonContent (media)View (database)Functional (mathematics)Content (media)Row (database)Multiplication signLevel (video gaming)MetadataTouch typingMathematicsInformationSoftware developerSinc functionArchaeological field surveyState of matterPower (physics)Axiom of choiceWebsiteQuicksortComputer animation
08:19
Revision controlPairwise comparisonLatent heatView (database)Content (media)Multiplication signRow (database)Content (media)Pairwise comparisonFunctional (mathematics)Computer animation
08:44
Natural languageSoftware developerVideo gameCycle (graph theory)Row (database)
09:05
Installation artElectric currentMechanism designSynchronizationTerm (mathematics)Integrated development environmentText editorInstance (computer science)Functional (mathematics)Core dumpRow (database)Multiplication signBitIntegrated development environmentGame controllerMoment (mathematics)Product (business)Computer architectureSoftware developerRevision controlLibrary catalogData storage deviceWebsitePoint (geometry)SoftwareObservational studyDistanceQuicksortComputer animation
11:40
Text editorInterface (computing)Group actionUser interfaceUser profileMoment (mathematics)DataflowText editorState of matterCoefficient of determinationMultiplication signGame controllerFunctional (mathematics)Interface (computing)Link (knot theory)Ocean currentParameter (computer programming)Beat (acoustics)Group actionDependent and independent variablesRepresentation (politics)BitRow (database)Computer animation
14:07
Process (computing)Correspondence (mathematics)Moment (mathematics)Functional (mathematics)System administratorConfiguration spaceMetadataProcess (computing)Point (geometry)MereologyCorrespondence (mathematics)DataflowMeasurementMathematicsObservational studyProgrammer (hardware)Workstation <Musikinstrument>Computer animation
15:22
Multiplication signFunctional (mathematics)Point (geometry)Sinc functionComputer clusterComputer animation
15:38
Combinational logicProfil (magazine)Moment (mathematics)Group actionRule of inferenceCoefficient of determinationContent (media)BitData managementQuicksortText editorDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Interface (computing)Ocean current
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
Hi, good morning everybody. We are ready to begin our first presentation this morning. And it's the Geo Network team. This is Paul and Antonio.
00:21
So, good morning everybody. When I submitted this talk three months ago, I thought this would be an interesting feature to talk about separately, because it's one of the new features now arriving in 3.8. But I didn't do any work on that myself, so I was very glad that my colleague Antonio
00:44
was able to join the conference, and so he did the actual work, so I gladly delegate this presentation to him. Thank you. Hi everyone. So, as Paul said, we are going to introduce some of the new functionality
01:04
that you will find in the newest release of Geo Network that lets you work in a better way with the documents that you treat in Geo Network, the metadata. We are from GeoCAD, probably you already saw this logo somewhere,
01:25
and as long as you don't get teleported in this room, we are a Dutch company working with open source SDI, and Geo Network is one of our favorite products, because it's one of the reasons that GeoCAD exists.
01:47
So, let's say something about what is Geo Network, in case some of you never heard of it. This is the homepage of the open source project.
02:00
Geo Network is a free open source project. It's an OS Geo project. The creator is the founder of the Geo Network, it's Giron Ticlera, the GeoCAD CEO, and it was founded 10 years ago at FAO, and now it's used in many important spatial data infrastructures around the world.
02:25
Most of them are in Europe. Indeed, Geo Network is also an Inspire-ready product that facilitates the adoption of this standard. And as around the project, there is a growing community of developers and users.
02:44
So, as you maybe know, Geo Network is a catalog to manage and expose geospatial references, the resources, data, and services. So, it's not just an archive, it's a catalog that is something more.
03:01
It's a way to share, organize, and categorize your assets. So, it's for geospatial assets, so spatial service and data set, that otherwise you don't have a better way to expose to the public.
03:22
Indeed, it facilitates the searchability and discoverability of this information. It supports a huge variety of metadata standards to describe your assets, but also it supports a lot of standards that let you relate to different services.
03:46
What is metadata? Metadata is data that provides information about other data or services. So, it's a way to describe something that in a catalog
04:00
totally makes sense to be the main record of interest. Indeed, I would like to focus on this aspect. For the rest of this presentation, we will consider metadata in a more simple way, just like the business content of Geo Network, so like the document that you treat in Geo Network.
04:22
What are the recipes for a good catalog? I like to use this example because when you want a good recipe, you have to choose good ingredients and have good tools and a good procedure to get a good result.
04:43
So, in a special catalog, the good ingredients are the data that you are exposing, so are your services and your data. So, it's up to you that you are exposing good things. Geo Network helps you in the next stage, in the way offering the tools to control the quality
05:03
and the correct delivery to the public of this information. So, this is how Geo Network facilitates this aspect. Inside Geo Network, there are already a lot of tools since from the beginning of the project
05:20
for facilitating the quality assessment of the data. It offers a powerful editor on the top of the XML, so lets you not have to change XML that is not a pleasant activity, as some of you already tried. It offers schema and schema validation,
05:43
so going back to the concept of the business content of your application, it offers a powerful way to check that the things that you are writing, that you are exposing are consistent, but in the correct way and follow the correct standard that will be exposed.
06:02
On the other hand, it also offers a set of instruments to build in the context of your organization a correct process to deliver this data. So, from a point of view, Geo Network is a content management system and it offers functionality that are really similar
06:21
to this kind of product, like user management and specific tools for editing and reviewing. We are going to present this new development of Geo Network that are really focused on these aspects. The first one is metadata history.
06:43
To say something scary, it's metadata of metadata. So basically, our information around your assets are administrative metadata of your records. Metadata record history is basically Geo Network registering each activity
07:03
that touches the status or the content of your records. Until now, you have only the last update, the time, and nothing more. Now you can check in time how many times and who changed the record.
07:21
This is a powerful instrument to control the quality of your data. So let's you answer some question of who changes this record, when these last changes have been done, and which are the records that are more
07:42
changed by the users of the portal. This functionality is available since 3.6. So it's available since January 2019, so probably some of you already had the opportunity to use it.
08:00
The developments were funded by European Environment Agency, and also the same agency is sponsoring the next stage of this development, the future improvement that will let you use this record to also view the content of the record
08:20
at the time that the history records were registered, and also restore the content of the record. Other functionality that were suggested to improve are a way to allow the side-to-side comparison between the record and the chronology
08:41
that right now is not yet planned. Another big development around the GeoNetwork record lifecycle are the draft and workflow improvements that are actually two different developments that we are going to present them together
09:01
because they are really related. Why draft? Who knows GeoNetwork and the basic workflow knows that it's a good workflow if you are publishing for the first time the record, so you can create a record without making it public until you decide to publish it.
09:21
But this is not enough in the moment that you have a published record and you want to change it because otherwise you have to modify directly the published record. This is a really required functionality, and luckily we had the opportunity to implement it. Until now it was possible
09:41
to simulate the draft functionality. Some customers actually had the issue, especially big governments usually have the needs to have more control about the quality assessment, and then they simulated creating more instance of GeoNetwork, pushing data from the editing record
10:00
to the public real catalog. Basically hacking of an architecture is not really a way to properly support a requirement, and it's not nice if you are a developer because basically to implement a function you require a completely new instance of the same software.
10:24
So basically you are doubling the resources requested just for a single functionality. It didn't happen before because, let me tell a bit of history, the first PR on the topic was in 2012
10:41
founded by Yajiv and Environment Canada. It didn't make it to the core because it was basically probably not well-welcomed by the community because at the time probably the development was not mature enough or there were a lot of conflict
11:03
about how this have been made. So basically you have, some customer already have this functionality in custom branch, but only with the version 3.8 the Genetor community was able to integrate in the core product this nice functionality
11:22
thanks to the sponsor by Dutch National Institute for Health and Environment and again Environment Canada. Another thing that it was also required a bit of improvement in the workflow that was not user friendly enough
11:41
to support such functionality. This is basically the workflow and how it works until before draft and it is a representation of what I said before. You have two users, the editor and the reviewer. Basically in time you have the editor creating the document, the reviewer approving or rejecting the document
12:03
and then the final publication of the record. After that nothing more. With this new functionality you have the opportunity to create a working copy of the published record and then create a new workflow
12:21
just for the working copy until you decide to replace the published document. Workflow improvements, as I said to support this functionality was really required to improve the current workflow of Genetor to improve a bit the clarity of the interface
12:45
that until now was more or less assigning a status to a document. Make more clear the responsibility because there was not really big control about who was responsible for the document at that moment in time.
13:02
The editor was still able to edit the document even if it was labeled as submitted to the reviewer. It's more clear than when is the right moment to publish data. How it was possible
13:21
thanks to making this status of the document more linked to actions. Basically when you want to submit a request you are not changing the status. You are explicitly hitting a button saying I want to submit it. When you hit a button,
13:40
you are not changing the status. It's an action that changes the status of any entity in a workflow. As I said, it's not necessary to indicate the next state. There are also other improvements in the interface like hiding the functionality
14:02
that should not be available at the current state of the document like the editing button for the editor in the moment that is submitted to the approver. Future improvements are possible but not still planned are the possibility
14:22
for the portal administrator to redefine the workflow to make the workflow configurable. Until now there are no requests about this functionality
14:41
so it's not really necessary. The current workflow mostly works for any major administration. If you know of other needs, please engage with the community and expose your need. Also it would be nice to add the possibility to automate the processing correspondence
15:01
of the change of status. It's possible in many points of the geonetwork in the harvesting and other functionality. It would be nice to have it also here and also integrate in a better way the first part of the functionality that we showed the history of metadata
15:20
together with the draft. So try Geonetwork 3.8 now. It's ready since Monday just in time for you and for 4G. So enjoy it. Let us know what you think about the new functionality. Thank you.
15:43
Thank you, Antonio. Does anyone have any questions? Hi. You talked about roles and different workflow. Is it possible to integrate towards the directory, for example?
16:03
This will require a permission management that currently is not implemented in Geonetwork. The current profiles are a bit hard-coded. So the rules that I said are more profiles than rules. So you are an editor and a reviewer and what you can do is hard-coded
16:20
in the current Geonetwork. I don't know if... It is possible to link an LDAP group to a combination of Geonetwork group plus role. So this is possible.
16:44
If I make a working copy of a published record and after that publish this, the working copy, does it get a new UUID or is it the same? No, no, absolutely not. The main purpose is to maintain the same document.
17:01
Even if it's a working copy, it's shadowed with the same UUID also in the editor interface. You are not seeing a new document. It's just a copy of the content that you can edit. So the UUID is the same. Anyone else? No?
17:24
Okay. Thank you.