geoLibro.org

So there is a remarkable dearth of documentation for geospatial datasets on my campus. A number of different researchers, labs, and other agencies are consuming and producing geospatial data from within their own insulated pockets of campus. Not very many are then doing anything clever or coordinated that would make those data discoverable and therefore usable by other groups on campus or, better still, the world.

The reason, naturally, is that it’s hard. PIs of these projects build machinery to help themselves first and foremost, secondarily fit the parameters of the project, provide ample fodder for publication and further research, and then somewhere down the line might think about how their stuff can be made more easily available to the world. Typically they mount some web-facing app and that’s that. Find it if you can.

So we started a project over the summer to build a utility that can be one portal to geodata for and from campus labs and researchers. It will be a catalog, of sorts, but has potential built into it to be a much more agile and robust machine than a lot of libraries put up. It’s built on the open source GeoNetwork platform, but almost all of our work so far has been devoted to making GN more usable, more accessible in the ways web apps need to be these days.

Let this post stand as an intro to a series of posts that will describe and document what we’ve done and what we’re doing with GN. None of us (it’s me, on of my GAs, and one student worker) are java developers. None of us are developers at all, in fact, but the students are game and we’ve been able to wrestle GN into submission on a number of aspects that might be of interest to others. Minimally, this series can be rolled into the articles we write following a hopefully-successful deployment.

So the next post will discuss some basics about GN and its architecture (not all of which I understand). There are some aspects of how it’s built that are especially attractive to a dumb, clumsy librarian and I intend to start with those. The posts that follow will be devoted to the incisions and clubbings we dealt that platform in an effort to get it to where we wanted it.