D.5.2: Metadata catalogue for drought information

Transcription

1 Project start date: 01 May 2009 Acronym: EuroGEOSS Project title: EuroGEOSS, a European Theme: FP7-ENV : Environment (including climate change) Theme title: ENV : European Environment Earth Observation system supporting INSPIRE and compatible with GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) Web site: D.5.2: Metadata catalogue for drought information Title Creator Javier Nogueras, Miguel Ángel Latre Abadía, Raquel Miguel Creation date 20/05/2010 Date of last revision 31/05/2010 Subject Drought data, Metadata, Catalogue Status Draft Final Publisher Type Description Contributor Format Source EuroGEOSS Text Report on the EuroGEOSS drought metadata catalogue Andrej Ceglar Pdf WP5 Drought Metadata Catalogue (Slides presentation for the 2nd WP5 meeting Ispra 10 May 2010) Rights Restricted Public Identifier Language Relation Coverage En WP5, related to WP2 European Union These are Dublin Core metadata elements. See for more details and examples

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 Introduction Initial situation and call for metadata Deployment of the drought metadata catalogue Web Client application for searching metadata Standard OGC interface Connection to the IOC brokering framework REFERENCES FIGURES Figure 1: Web Client application for searching metadata GUI... 6 Figure 2: Search criteria: location... 7 Figure 3: Search criteria: keywords or text... 7 Figure 4: Search criteria: SBA categories and subcategories... 8 Figure 5: Search criteria: temporal parameters... 8 Figure 6: Search criteria: resource type (data or services)... 9 Figure 7: Catalog client to test operations on the Standard OGC interface Figure 8: Example of a Catalog client accessing the EuroGEOSS broker and retrieving metadata coming from the Drought Catalogue (a registered source within the EuroGEOSS broker) Figure 9: The drought catalogue within the distributed architecture provided by the brokering framework Figure 10. Distributed approach to support multiple drought catalogues TABLES Table 1: Metadata included in the Drought Metadata Catalogue /14

3 ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS Abbreviation BRGM CHE CNIG CNR CSW GCI GEOSS GUI IAAA IGN INSPIRE IOC ISO J2EE JRC KVP OGC OSE SBA SOAP ULBF XML Name Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières Confederación Hidrográfica del Ebro Centro Nacional de Información Geográfica Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Catalog Service for the Web GEOSS Common Infrastructure Global Earth Observation System of Systems Graphic User Interface Advanced Information Systems Group (Universidad de Zaragoza) Instituto Geográfico Nacional Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe Initial Operating Capacity International Organization for Standardization Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition Joint Research Centre Key Value Pair Open Geospatial Consortium Observatorio de la Sostenibilidad en España Univerza v Ljubljani, Biotehniška fakulteta Simple Object Access Protocol Univerza v Ljubljani, Biotehniška fakulteta extensible Markup Language 1 INTRODUCTION EuroGEOSS Task 5.2 objective is the creation of drought metadata and a drought catalogue: This task creates a comprehensive distributed metadata cataloguing system for drought data and models based on INSPIRE and GEOSS specifications. Specific disciplinary requirements not addressed by existing international standards will be submitted as GEOSS Special Arrangements. This deliverable consists of: A catalogue with a standard interface in compliance with the OGC Catalogue Services for the Web (CSW) specification: A Web Client application for searching metadata: A catalogue client to test operations on the standard CSW interface: This report, which provides an overview of the drought metadata creation process and on the developed catalogue. 2 INITIAL SITUATION AND CALL FOR METADATA At the start of the project only two WP5 partners (CNIG and CHE) had metadata catalogues describing drought related resources together with other types of resources, while some of the other partners had no metadata available for their drought related resources they use. Given that situation, it was decided to make a call for metadata and create a dedicated catalogue (instead of starting with a distributed solution). This way, it is easier to filter available resources and a solution can be given for partners with no metadata catalogue. In addition to this, CNIG and CHE catalogues have been included in the WP2 broker (GI-Cat), together with this WP5 drought 3/14

4 catalogue, so all metadata resources available from WP5 partners are accessible in a distributed way. On 26 th October 2009, a first call for metadata records describing all the drought-related datasets at partners institutions was made. ISO (and ISO 19139) standard was recommended but existent metadata in accordance with other standards or formats were also accepted. During the creation of metadata and inclusion in the catalogue of the ones already existing, some problems where identified: Standard to be used: even by using ISO 19115, the selection of a profile, such as ISO Core, or the selection of other standard (such as INSPIRE metadata, although implemented as ISO19115) is not an easy task. Language to be used: the choice between the original language (that, for instance, INSPIRE Metadata Implementing Rules [INSPIRE 2009] indicates is the default if the data set is in that original language) or English (that, in the context of a European project, will increase the ease of access and discovery of the described resource). Description of data in tabular format, and included within reports with a bigger scope. Dealing with property rights: for instance, in the case of dealing with data intended for public service but not publicly available. Dealing with irregular temporal coverage. Drought data are sometimes only collected when drought is recognized as a national problem. Table 1 presents the number of the metadata records received describing datasets from partners by 19 th March 2010, and their state of inclusion in the drought metadata catalogue. Institution Table 1: Metadata on datasets included in the Drought Metadata Catalogue Number of records received Metadata Language Metadata Standard CNIG/IGN 5 Spanish ISO Number of records Description uploaded Metadata describing reference datasets: Cartographic Numeric Base, Borderlines Database, Digital Terrain Model, National Ortophoto Database 5 Metadata describing indicators of the Spanish Sustainability Observatory 80 FGUA/OSE 80 Spanish ISO FGUA/OSE 11 Spanish ISO SIA (Water Information System) 11 Metadata describing networks of piezometry and automated CHE 2 Spanish ISO hydrologic information system 2 2 examples of metadata integrated IPE (CSIC) 2 Spanish none within NetCDF and Miramon tool. ULBF 58 English ISO Drought related data 58 In parallel with the call for metadata on drought datasets, WP2 had requested partners from the thematic work packages to provide information on published web services, in order to be linked to the EuroGEOSS broker. The information requested by WP2 was: title of the web service, societal benefit area, service end point (URL), type of service, version, point of contact, and abstract. Taking into account the information on web services provided by WP5 members, ISO 19115/19119 compliant metadata (including the ISO metadata elements for implementing the INSPIRE metadata implementing rules for services [INSPIRE 2009]) were created by combining, for each service, the 4/14

5 information provided to WP2 and the metadata obtained by invoking the GetCapabilites operation of the service, since all web services contributed by WP5 partners were OGC services. Table 2 presents the number of metadata records describing services included in the drought metadata catalogue by 19 th March Institution Table 2: Metadata on services included in the Drought Metadata Catalogue Number of records Metadata Language Metadata Standard CNIG/IGN 4 Spanish ISO Number of records Description uploaded IDEE Data and Services Catalog, IDEE Base WMS, PNOA WMS 4 Services provided by CHE: Cat, WMS, WFS 8 CHE 8 Spanish ISO JRC (EDO) 1 English ISO WMS 1 FGUA/OSE 2 English ISO WMS 2 3 DEPLOYMENT OF THE DROUGHT METADATA CATALOGUE The drought metadata catalog includes a Web Client application for searching metadata (accessible at and a standard interface in compliance with the OGC Catalogue Services for the Web specification (accessible at The current contents of the drought metadata catalogue include 156 datasets of four WP5 partners (CHE, IGN/CNIG, FGUA/OSE and ULBF) and 15 services of those partners (CHE, IGN/CNIG, FGUA/OSE and JRC) that already contributed with their services to fill the contents of the GI-Cat catalogue broker deployed at BRGM. Both metadata on data and metadata on services are stored as ISO XML files. 3.1 Web Client application for searching metadata The Web Client application for searching metadata (accessible at and its graphic user interface is shown in Figure 1. 5/14

6 Figure 1: Web Client application for searching metadata GUI The searching criteria included in this client has been extracted from the GCI Clearinghouse Requirements [GEO, 2009]: In order to access resources contained within catalogue(s) of data holdings, the need to implement both distributed search and harvesting techniques is recognised and implemented, as appropriate. GEOSS Clearinghouse utilizes the OGC Catalog Service protocol (client) to access the Component and Service Registry and community catalogs external to the GCI. Users must be able to search GEOSS-registered resources, interacting with the GEOSS Clearinghouse, based on (1) location (i.e. place name, bounding box, etc.) [see Figure 2] (2) keywords or text [see Figure 3] (3) Societal Benefit Area (SBA) [see Figure 4] (4) SBA sub-categories, [see Figure 4] (5) temporal parameters where such properties are managed in metadata [see Figure 5] In addition to this, a resource type criterion was also included as a way to allow users to distinguish the resource type (data or services) in their searches (see Figure 6). Initially, metadata records did not include SBA Categories, ISO topic categories or INSPIRE data themes, so it was necessary to modify them to include terms from these vocabularies (ontologies). This is an initial step but during the project the future the WP2 recommendations about ontologies will be addressed. Currently, metadata from Spanish partners are only available 6/14

7 in Spanish, which may impose some difficulties in the searching and accessing of information for some WP5 partners. Figure 2: Search criteria: location (1) Location Note: currently only bounding box restriction, possible restriction by place name (gazetteer) in the future Figure 3: Search criteria: keywords or text (2) keywords or text Note: ISO topic category is commonly used in several geoportals (ESA and Compusult GEOSS geoportal examples) 7/14

8 Figure 4: Search criteria: SBA categories and subcategories (3) Societal Benefit Area (SBA) (4) SBA sub-categories ( ) Figure 5: Search criteria: temporal parameters (5) temporal parameters 8/14

9 Figure 6: Search criteria: resource type (data or services) Resource type: criterium commonly used to distinguish the resource type in several geoportals 3.2 Standard OGC interface The standard interface of the drought metadata catalogue (compliant with the OGC Catalogue Services for the Web specification) is accessible at the address Together with this standard interface, a catalogue client to test operations is also available at This GUI client is shown in Figure 7. 9/14

10 Figure 7: Catalog client to test operations on the Standard OGC interface The technology of this catalogue has been developed by the Universidad de Zaragoza: the server side and the standard OGC interface belongs to the Open Source product SpatiumCube CatalogCube ( which is part of SpatiumCube, an Open Source Initiative developed by GeoSpatiumLab, Zeta Amaltea and Universidad de Zaragoza (IAAA) with the support of IGN/CNIG. CatalogCube is compliant with version of OGC CSW specification, it integrates a server and a web client application to test operations and it is multi-platform software (Windows, Unix) developed with J2EE. Metadata is loaded in an easy way, since its storage is managed directly through the file system. The server side of the product supports the compulsory operations (GetCapabilities, DescribeRecord, GetRecords, GetRecordById) plus transactional operations to allow the update of the catalogue contents. Both ISO19115 and Dublin Core metadata models and their output schemas are supported, metadata are indexed based on Lucene search engine to 10/14

11 allow for ranked searching and its compatibility has been tested with other tools such as GI-Cat/GI- Go, Geonetwork and CatalogConnector. The web client offers a multilingual guided interface to facilitate definition of CSW requests (including maps and other graphic components for query filter expressions) using KVP, XML and SOAP protocols. 4 CONNECTION TO THE IOC BROKERING FRAMEWORK The EuroGEOSS drought catalogue has been registered as a service accessible through the EuroGEOSS broker component ( [EuroGEOSS, 2010]. The EuroGEOSS broker component is based on GI-Cat software 1. Figure 8 shows a screenshot of the GI-Go client tool accessing the EuroGEOSS broker. GI-Go is an accompanying software of GI- Cat that enables the testing of standardized catalogue interfaces. In this figure we can observe how a user accesses the EuroGEOSS broker and the broker returns metadata results coming from the EuroGEOSS drought catalogue. Figure 8: Example of a Catalog client accessing the EuroGEOSS broker and retrieving metadata coming from the Drought Catalogue (a registered source within the EuroGEOSS broker) /14

12 Thanks to the connection to the IOC brokering framework, EuroGEOSS users can discover drought related resources in a distributed way because the drought catalogue is integrated within the distributed architecture provided by EuroGEOSS. 12/14

13 Figure 9 describes this distributed architecture. All types of services available in the thematic areas, as well as some services for reference data, have been registered within the EuroGEOSS broker. The drought catalogue (marked in yellow together with its client applications) is another registered source. It must be noted that the drought catalogue describes both datasets and services. 13/14

14 Figure 9: The drought catalogue within the distributed architecture provided by the brokering framework In the future, if new catalogues specialized in drought resources arise, the present drought catalogue could be transformed into a default drought catalogue and a drought catalogue broker could be deployed to act as a distributed catalogue specialized on drought resources. Figure 10 shows this distributed approach to support multiple drought catalogues. 14/14

15 Figure 10. Distributed approach to support multiple drought catalogues REFERENCES GEO, GCI Consolidated Requirements. Available at: EuroGEOSS, D Specification of EUROGEOSS Initial Operating Capacity. Available at: INSPIRE INSPIRE Metadata Implementing Rules: Technical Guidelines based on EN ISO and EN ISO (Revised edition). Available at: 15/14