Hi all,
During a visit to the ESSI Labs, I was given a demonstration of GI-cat,
which is an open source package, which
- "Allows clients to discover and evaluate geoinformation resources over
a federation of data sources;
- Allows different clients to use the service, as it publishes different
catalog interfaces.
A data provider can deploy his/her own GI-cat instance, grouping together
disparate data sources, to accommodate his/her user needs."
As noted on the web description, it can be accessed by a via a number of
different standards-based catalog interfaces, so many clients are available
in addition to the GI-Go catalog/search client of ESSI labs.
*ESSI Labs page:*
http://zeus.pin.unifi.it/joomla/
GI-cat page:
http://zeus.pin.unifi.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/GIcat
GI-go page:
http://zeus.pin.unifi.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/GIgo/WebHome
To me, it seems to me an excellent complement to THREDDS Data Server
technologies. During the demo, we were able to connect to a TDS service on
the NCDC NOMADS server simply by entering the URL via the convenient
configuration interface. This appears to be a very good solution for
filling a gap between THREDDS (and many other) data services and
standards-based search systems.
-- Ben
