Saturday, January 21, 2012

mapwindow & metadata

Today i looked at the mapwindow/dotspatial project http://mapwindow.org. A plain-functional .Net desktop gis product. The program has a very nice plug-in architecture. Through a vast list of plug-ins quite some advanced geo-actions can be done. My interest lies in metadata, i was hoping for a CSW-search imlementation. Unfortunately it's currently not available (and no work being done), even WMS/WFS is not supported out of the box (basic WMS through a plug-in). However I was quite surprised to find a metadata-plugin in 4.8 (not in 6?). The plug-in works quite nice. A tree structure for the metadata and for every item a clear edit-form appears. The metadata is however very ESRI-FGDC oriented. In the metadataviewer are actually esri-stylesheets used.
So disappointing to find very limited support for iso19115.
I think (through the WMS-plugin) the basis is there for a CSW search plug-in, extending mapwindow in that direction would be nice. A first quick win is in the context-menu for a WMS-layer, 'show metadata' should not result in a warning ('not available') but get the metadata-link from getcapabilities and display the metadata from the WMS-server!
Maybe i'll dive in the code one day and get it done myself...
Good luck dotspatial/mapwindow team....!