SDI's typically have a challenge of a data publication requiring a review phase before becoming approved and accessible. It is relevant for each aspect of data publication; data, transformations, service and metadata. The review phase should be as complete as possible (including INSPIRE/OGC/QOS validation) so there will be no surprises when making the resource widely available.

GeoNetwork has had a workflow module to allow users to review a record before it becoming public for a long time, however the functionality was a bit hidden and had some challenges. This summer we're landing a 5 years old feature branch in GeoNetwork to improve this aspect of the application. The workflow, if configured, is brought more upfront and a mechanism has been added to allow to work in a draft version, before the approved copy is replaced.

This branch has been extensively tested by some of our users in recent years. From their experiences we’ll highlight some of the additional benefits of this module. The workflow mechanism can also be used to trigger publication of datasets in external components, such as Docker or GeoServer.

The GeoNetwork Opensource project has been an OSGeo project since a decade. It is a catalog application facilitating discovery of resources within any local, regional, national or global SDI. Users can register their spatial datasets, services, maps, sensors in a central catalog. Others can query the catalog to find resources via the website or directly from a GIS application, like GeoNode or QGIS. The catalog records can also be ingested by other catalogs and search engines to facilitate wider discovery.

In this presentation the core developers introduce you to recent developments in the community. GeoNetwork adopted a twice-a-year lifecycle, so we’ve released the 3.6 and 3.8 version which had some interesting new features like metadata workflow, history, INSPIRE metadata guidelines 2.0, DOI, user searches, json and json-ld encodings, inline validation, WFS 2 and 19115-3:2018. Currently we’re in a major refactor to migrate the catalog to use ElasticSearch as a base search index for the 4.0 version.