GeoBlacklight requirements gathering

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
2 min read

Moderator: Jack Reed

  • Attendees:
    • Jack Reed - Stanford
    • Darren Hardy - Stanford
    • Eliot Jordan - Princeton
    • Thomas Scherz - Cincinnati 
    • Glen Horton - Cincinnati
    • Andreas - Royal Library of Denmark
    • John Ajao - UCSB
    • Rick (question) - Columbia
    • Sheetal Chavan - Experis
    • Guilla - UC Berkeley
    • Ian Lessing - UCSB
    • Greg Rieser - UCSD
    • Longshou Situ - UCSD
    • Vivian Chu - UCSD
    • Arwen Hutt - UCSD

 

  • Motivations for GeoBlacklight: 
    • We don't just need a geoportal, we need a full scale solution to how to manage GIS assets
    • GIS data discovery
  • What's a layer and how does that map to a fedora object?
    • Each GIS layer is its own fedora object
    • The grouping of a set of layers is its own fedora object too
    • Darren shows a demo of a set of oil and gas layers and the way they are grouped together through RDF relationships

 

Use case 1: General Spatial Search

Geographic data in MODS, have a world map, be able to draw a box on it, and get a list of all the assets in the repository that are inside that box. 

We drew this on the board. Maybe there's two versions of the same map interaction, one widget that can go in the left facet bar, and one larger version of the map that can be in a tabbed interface in the search results screen.

Q from Jack: When we have thousands of results, what are some ways we can optimize for performance? Clustering of results, heat maps, etc. Doesn't need to be super precise for huge numbers of items. 

Darren showed us GeoHollis as an example of how Harvard has done this.

Threshold for seeing results on a map should be seamless. When you zoom in you should get increasing levels of detail. 

http://protectedplanet.net is another example of good spatial search. When you zoom in you get into specific contexts, and you start to see data related to the part of the map you've zoomed into. 

Spatial search in Blacklight already exists at NCSU: http://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/map

Use case 2: GIS Layer display

When you're browsing GIS data, being able to display a preview of the data is vital. As long as you have a WMS service for all of your data, displaying a preview of the data isn't difficult. Opacity, border, zoom, information browser.

Users want to be able to display data before they go to the trouble of downloading it.

Q: What about data attached to the layers? A: You need the WFS service to do that. We have WFS, but we need to think about how to index that content. 

Could we make keywords from the ISO more prominent in the discovery interface? 

Action items:

  • If we agree on a way to record spatial data in MODS, it gives us a known case to code against. Darren shared Geo data in MODS working documentand we'll publicize this. Expectation is that if people follow this example their data will be compatible with the solutions we develop.
  • If you want to be part of the geoBL working group, email Jack Reed at pjreed [at] stanford.edu