tommy's scratchpad

It’s seem like ages ago since the initial QGIS MetaSearch announce and call for help in 2014.  Inspired by Sourcepole’s FOSS4G 2015 presentations, here’s a brief status update:

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• MetaSearch is now a core plugin shipped with QGIS (!!)
• we now have a default/approved connections list of major CSW endpoints as well as multilingual documentation
• MetaSearch is now fully integrated into the QGIS source code, wiki and issue tracker
• for power users, interim releases continue to be supported on plugins.qgis.org
  • MetaSearch has risen quickly and is the 2nd most popular and 2nd most downloaded plugin

A sincere thanks to Richard Duivenvoorde, Angelos Tzotsos, Alexander Bruy, Tim Sutton and the rest of the QGIS developers/community for helping bring MetaSearch into QGIS to help move the search / discovery workflow forward!

As far as a roadmap, here’s a laundry list of future items:

• OWSLib dependency cleanup: currently we manage a copy of OWSLib in QGIS proper.  This is because there is a gap in packaging across supported platforms.  It would be great to have approved OWSLib packages (see issue)
• Metadata publishing and management: it would be great to manage and publish better metadata directly from MetaSearch.  The end result will be a more streamlined, deeper integration and support of metadata within QGIS.  No movement on these yet, but there are QEPs proposed
• ISO based servers: MetaSearch supports the OGC Core CSW model.  Most CSWs implement the CSW ISO Application Profile which supports more detailed metadata
• add data functionality: it would also be very great to directly add raw data from a metadata record’s access links into QGIS.  We already support this for OGC services, and supporting direct data downloads to visualize in QGIS would complete the “publish/find/bind” workflow

Do you have any enhancements you would like to see in MetaSearch?    Feel free to bring them in the MetaSearch issue tracker or the QGIS mailing lists!  Do you have fixes or features to contribute?  Feel free to fork and send pull requests!