We've been exploring Apache Zeppelin as a way of providing a powerful and flexible analytical interface for Geonetwork and are pleased to announce beta integration with the Geonetwork login credentials.
Astun use Geonetwork 3.2 as our metadata portal, supplying metadata to local authorities and government bodies, for both INSPIRE and Enterprise use. A question our customers often ask is which metadata records are the most popular? Our Enterprise customers also have more detailed requirements, such as discovering which metadata records have been started but not finished, how many have been published and so on.
Geonetwork itself provides search and content statistics, but only to users with Administrative rights, and it's not always straightforward to extend these to include new search options.
It's possible to connect Zeppelin to PostgreSQL, which is the database we use behind the scenes to store not only the Geonetwork metadata, but also user information, metadata status, and so on. Therefore, we can use Zeppelin to interrogate the Geonetwork catalog using SQL, and do more analysis than is exposed by Geonetwork itself.
Zeppelin provides a safe, read-only front-end to the database, avoiding any concerns about data integrity. Query results can be displayed in a number of ways, so the end-user can choose the most appropriate chart type for their data. Users can embed their results in reports, or send links to colleagues, and can schedule query updates to ensure the reports are always up to date.
The holy grail of this work is to seemlessly integrate Geonetwork and Zeppelin so that users don't have to log in to both packages, and maintain two sets of passwords. Eventually we also want to style Zeppelin so that it fits with the new, clean Geonetwork style, and link to it from the Geonetwork home page.
The first part of this wish-list is now complete! We commissioned GeoCat, as core Geonetwork developers, to build the necessary components, and a beta-version of this code is now available on GitHub. This can be configured to connect to a Geonetwork PostgreSQL database and will allow you to log in with your Geonetwork Administrative credentials.
Watch this space for further enhancements!
Astun use Geonetwork 3.2 as our metadata portal, supplying metadata to local authorities and government bodies, for both INSPIRE and Enterprise use. A question our customers often ask is which metadata records are the most popular? Our Enterprise customers also have more detailed requirements, such as discovering which metadata records have been started but not finished, how many have been published and so on.
Geonetwork itself provides search and content statistics, but only to users with Administrative rights, and it's not always straightforward to extend these to include new search options.
Enter Apache Zeppelin!
From the blurb:Apache Zeppelin is a web-based notebook that enables data-driven, interactive data analytics and collaborative documents with SQL, Scala and more.
It's possible to connect Zeppelin to PostgreSQL, which is the database we use behind the scenes to store not only the Geonetwork metadata, but also user information, metadata status, and so on. Therefore, we can use Zeppelin to interrogate the Geonetwork catalog using SQL, and do more analysis than is exposed by Geonetwork itself.
Zeppelin provides a safe, read-only front-end to the database, avoiding any concerns about data integrity. Query results can be displayed in a number of ways, so the end-user can choose the most appropriate chart type for their data. Users can embed their results in reports, or send links to colleagues, and can schedule query updates to ensure the reports are always up to date.
Integration with Geonetwork
The holy grail of this work is to seemlessly integrate Geonetwork and Zeppelin so that users don't have to log in to both packages, and maintain two sets of passwords. Eventually we also want to style Zeppelin so that it fits with the new, clean Geonetwork style, and link to it from the Geonetwork home page.
The first part of this wish-list is now complete! We commissioned GeoCat, as core Geonetwork developers, to build the necessary components, and a beta-version of this code is now available on GitHub. This can be configured to connect to a Geonetwork PostgreSQL database and will allow you to log in with your Geonetwork Administrative credentials.
Watch this space for further enhancements!
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