Geodata Discovery

Standard proposal for the (auto-)discovery of geodata

Author: Stefan Keller

There is a strong proposal in order to support search services (especially webcrawlers) and thus to ease the discovery of geodata.

The Geodata Discovery standard consists of following parts or other standards:

1. A "see and see also" file containing typified weblinks that provide semantics to help focussed crawlers.
   1. Weblink typing: xlink Atom link relation type,
   2. Carrier file formats: HTML (Meta Tags) sitemaps.xml , KML, GeoRSS (xlinks)
2. Geotag icon (Microformat) for human readability and trustworthiness (Google's principle of visual control).
3. A leightweight harversting interface like OpenSearch-Geo
4. Extension of GetCapabilities from OGC WxS specifications

This proposal does not compete with existing standards like CSW. In contrary, it is a supplement of those. It's the basis for better domain-specific search engines, like geocat or geometa.info.

This proposal is own experiences and - among others - based on the following sources:

• http://highearthorbit.com/geoweb-standards-discoverability/
• http://sgillies.net/blog/985/proposed-standard-for-web-linking