new stuff in OWSLib
I’ve been spending alot of time lately doing a CSW client library in python, which was committed today to OWSLib. CSW requests can be tricky to construct correctly, so this contribution attempts to provide an easy enough entry point to querying OGC Catalogues.
At this point, you can query your favourite CSW server with:
>>> from owslib import csw
>>> c = csw.request('http://example.org/csw')
>>> c.GetCapabilities() # constructs XML request, in c.request
>>> c.fetch() # HTTP call. Result in c.response
>>> c.GetRecords('dataset','birds',[-152,42,-52,84]) # birds datasets in Canada
>>> c.fetch()
>>> c.GetRecords('service','frog') # look for services with frogs, anywhere
>>> c.fetch()
That’s pretty much all there is to it. There’s also support for DescribeRecord, GetRecordById and GetDomain for the adventurous.
I hope this will be a valuable addition. Because CSW uses Filter, I broke things out into a module per standard, so that other code can reuse, say, filter for request building and response parsing. A colleague is using this functionality to write a QGIS CSW search plugin.
My next goal will be to put in some response handling. This will be tricky given the various outputSchema’s a given CSW advertises. For now, I will concentrate on the default csw:Record (a glorified Dublin Core with ows:BoundingBox).
So try it out; comments, feedback and suggestions would be most valued.
Oh ya, thank you etree!
