Beginning work on Gemini 2.3

The AGI have recently published the new standard for publishing metadata in the UK: Gemini 2.3, and at Astun we're pleased to announce that we have begun work on a plugin to use this standard in the Geonetwork Metadata Catalogue.

The deadline for migrating to Gemini 2.3 is December 2019, which seems like a long way away but will no doubt come around sooner than we expect!

What's Involved?

Creating a new metadata standard plugin in Geonetwork takes several steps. Firstly we need to know what has changed between Gemini 2.2 and 2.3, and luckily the AGI have produced a handy document summarising this. Then we have to build the schema definitions and stylesheets so that Geonetwork knows how and what to display, both when viewing the metadata and editing it. This is the hard part! We need to add codelists and suggestions so that some elements can be chosen from lists rather than hand-typed. After that, we need to add in the new validation rules to ensure that the metadata created actually meets the standard. We need to build examples, templates, and documentation to ensure users know what they are doing. Then finally we need to build xsl to transform metadata in other standards (primarily Gemini 2.2, but also imports from ESRI and other packages) into Gemini 2.3.

Can I try it?

Not yet! Our work-in-progress plugin has been published in the Astun Technology GitHub repository, but it's a long way from being complete and may even break Geonetwork at present. When it's completed, we will publish it to metadata101.org, as we did with our plugin for Gemini 2.2, and in the meantime we'll post regular updates on progress here on the blog.

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