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. "see and see also" links 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) linking to the formats containing "see and see also" links.
3. OpenSearch-Geo as a leightweight harversting interface. Its simply some HTML tags: see OpenSearch.org > OpenSearch Geo extension (Draft).
4. Extension of GetCapabilities from OGC WxS specifications: tbd.!

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