[udig-devel] CS-W 2.0 client

[Jody Garnett]

Bart van den Eijnden (OSGIS) wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> is uDIG a CS-W 2.0 client (I cannot find it in the user interface of 1.1
> RC2)? If not, are there plans to implement it?
>   
Being a CS-W 2.0 client was one of the original goals of uDig, but the 
specification was not ready in time. I am going to have to wait for 
funding in order to do this one properly (too bad we missed out of OWS-4 
this year). You will find that uDig makes use of the GeoConnections 
discovery portal (just to prove the catalog api we developed), and makes 
use of a simple web service backed on to a database populated by web 
searches.

Paul Ramsey has had a couple of rants about CS-W not solving the problem 
that needs to be solved. Finding information, last I checked it took 
three request to both find information, and figure out what service it 
was hosted on and finally in what manner it was available on. Compared 
with the above mentioned services that can find WMS and WFS layers with 
a single query ...

Note: CS-W is realy great when used what is good for. In OWS-3 we used 
it to automate the construction of transparent workflows - making OGC 
look easy as a drag and drop.  One user action would set up 
WFS->FPS->Client, with SLD provided by WFS->CSW.

Also in OWS-3 we just embedded a browser, used it to show the web front 
end to a say the Nasa CS-W catalog (or GeoNetwork if you want to be open 
source), any clicks in the browser were checked to see if they were a 
GetCapabilities document, in which case the content was added to the 
current map.  It worked and looked great, but was once again an abuse of 
standards ...

Cheers,
Jody