tommy's scratchpad

I’ve had some time to work on CSW support in OWSLib in the last few days.  Some thoughts and updates:

FGDC Support Added

Some CSW endpoints out there serve up GetRecords responses in FGDC CSDGM format.  This has now been added to trunk (mandatory elements + eainfo).  Note that csw:Record (DMCI + ows:BoundingBox) and ISO 19139 are already supported.  One tricky bit here is that FGDC was/is mostly implemented without a namespace, which CSW requires as an outputSchema parameter value.  I’ve used http://www.fgdc.gov for now.

Both FGDC and ISO (moreso ISO) have deep and complex content models, so if there are elements that you don’t see supported in OWSLib, please file an feature request ticket in trac, and I’ll make sure to implement (and add to the doctests).

Metadata Identifiers are Important!

When parsing GetRecords requests, we store records in a Python dict, using /gmd:MD_Metadata/gmd:fileIdentifier (for ISO), /csw:Record/dc:identifier (for CSW’s baseline) or /metadata/idinfo/datasetid (for FGDC).  Some responses return metadata without these ids for whatever reason.  This sets the dict key to Python’s None type, which ends up overwriting the dict key’s entry.  Not good.  I implemented a fix to set a random, non-persistent identifier so as not to lose data.

Of course, the best solution here would be for providers to set identifiers accordingly from the start.  Then again, what happens when CSW endpoints harvest other CSWs and identifiers are the same?  Perhaps a namespace of some sort for the CSW would help.  This would be an interesting interoperability experiment.

Harvest Support Added

I implemented a first pass of supporting Harvest operations.  CSW endpoints usually require authentication here, which may vary by the implementation.  Therefore, I’ve left this logic out of OWSLib as it’s not part of the standard per se.

Transaction Support Coming

Sebastian Benthall of OpenGeo has indicated that they are using OWSLib’s CSW support for some of their projects (awesome!), and has kindly submitted a patch for an optional element issue (thanks Sebastian!).  He also indicated that Transaction support would be of interest, so I’ve started to think about this one.  As with the Harvest operation, Transaction support also requires some sort of authentication, which we’ll leave to the client implementation.  Most of the work will be with marshalling the request, as response handling is very similar to Harvest responses.

Give it a go, submit bugs and enhancements to the OWSLib trac.  Enjoy!