201311csw inspire

GeoNetwork has an extensive but not fully INSPIRE compliant CSW service. We should advance on this aspect to make geoNetwork a fully compliant INSPIRE CSW server.

Configuration of the capabilities document is now managed in a config.xml file. Would it be feasable to manage this in a web-form?

Other aspects related to CSW are challenges with the CSW harvester. A harvester retrieves metadata in bulk from other catalogues. The GeoNetwork CSW harvester is slower than what it could be. Improving CSW Harvesters does not only mean faster harvesting results but also that it will use less resources.

Right now we are not using an optimized pool of calls to the CSW server to harvest. This means, geoNetwork can speed up using a more intelligent combination of requests to the main CSW server to harvest. We should also add some customizations to the harvesting management, like the number of records to retrieve on each call, to make sure we make the best use of the remote CSW server, without stressing it too much. There is no universal optimized configuration on this.

We mostly target meeting the OGC testbed tests. However there are other aspects of the standard, for which no testbed is available, and seems missing in geonetwork. This moslty deals with certain aspects of CSW-T. Would be good to look into that.