2019 FOSS4G Bucharest Talks speaker: Paul van Genuchten

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Talks

Next generation OGC web services with pygeoapi

A new era is upon us. The OGC service architecture is undergoing a clean break in an attempt to modernize geospatial API standards. REST, JSON and OpenAPI are now common terminology in emerging OGC API standards. This change will greatly lower the barrier to implementation of services, clients and associated toolkit.

pygeoapi is a young and emerging project that is an early adopter of the new OGC API efforts. pygeoapi is an extensible geosaptial web API framework based in Python that already supports WFS 3.0. This presentation will provide an overview of the project, standards supported, extensibility/plugin framework, real world implementations as well as future plans.

Metadata workflow, history and draft in GeoNetwork

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.

One click data publishing for QGIS to support OGC/INSPIRE

You may have heard about the GeoCat Bridge plugin for ArcMAP. A plugin to facilitate hybrid open source/proprietary environments. We’re planning a similar tool for QGIS. We'll present the current status and challenges in this presentation. Main goal of this plugin is to ‘facilitate publication to an open OGC/INSPIRE SDI as easy as possible’. To facilitate this we apply various principles:

  • Publish data as layer/coverage/featuretype in GeoServer or Mapserver
  • Require minimal metadata to comply to OGC/INSPIRE
  • Register datasets in a catalog with proper linkage to/from the data services
  • Migrate data to GeoPackage, Postgres or reference existing data

An important aspect to focus on is metadata management. Last year an initiative started to improve metadata management in QGIS. Some major improvements have been introduced. The Bridge tool will benefit from these developments. New options are the ability to import, export, validate and publish INSPIRE/ISO metadata. Improve SLD creation (for usage in Geoserver). Proper linkage between the catalog and the gis server.

GeoNetwork Opensource: What’s Happening and Upcoming

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.