TEAM 5: Agriculture Innovation Hub for Africa

This is the first progress report of the team no 5 of the Nairobi INSPIRE Hackathon 2019. The team is led by Karel Charvat and Tuula Löytty.

This time, the team is presenting one of the key components of the technical solution which is the open metadata catalogue Micka.

(Open)Micka is a Web application for management
and discovery of (geo)spatial (meta)data. From a user perspective, it
represents a cataloguing tool for searching and finding relevant resources,
such as geospatial and non-geospatial datasets, Web services, sensor
measurements, map compositions, (traffic) models, documents, Web pages,
reports, legislation or e-shop. The main goal of (Open)Micka is to connect all
the relevant kinds of resources and provide answers, for instance, to the
following questions:

  • show
    me all data and (map) visualizations that were developed according to such
    legislation or
  • show
    me what has been done with such sensor measurements (derived datasets, policy,
    link to e-shop selling the raw sensor measurements,…).

As such, (Open)Micka is intended to be used as
a tool for discovery of various kinds of resources. (Open)Micka is a
customizable and scalable tool that is going to be modified according to the
purposes of each pilot. Anyway, a general use case scenario may be identified as
follows:

  1. A
    user would
    like to discover     relevant information regarding his/her area of
    interest, theme and other preferences. A user e.g. searches for all kind of
    available information related to European Noise Directive in the area on the
    border of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Austria.
  2. On
    contrary to Web searching engines, the (Open)Micka enables to define advanced (multiple) searching criteria, such as to draw a rectangle in a
    map to define the area that I am interested in, to define quality of information
    I am interested in (such as spatial accuracy higher than one meter) or to define
    the responsible authority. E.g. I would like to obtain only noise measurements
    from official mapping authorities.
  3. A
    user than obtains relevant (meta)information on all the available
    resources he/she was searching for. He/she may look into details as well as see
    all the related resources that provides links to other applications. E.g. a
    user discovers a NoiseDataset that fulfils all his/her criteria and would like
    to see a preview of such dataset on a map, see the legal act under which the
    dataset was created, have a link for the sensor measurement that was conducted
    in order to populate the NoiseDataset or use a link to the e-shop to buy the
    dataset.
  4. From
    a producer’s
    perspective, a producer may import his/her metadata from another system or
    create them manually.
  5. A
    producer than decides which metadata will be published, i.e. made available
    over the internet.

More illustratively, an (Open)Micka allows users
to:

  1. Find the relevant information resources
  2. Between the following information resources: geospatial and non-geospatial datasets, Web services, sensor measurements, map compositions, (traffic) models, documents, Web pages, reports, legislation or e-shop.
  3. Define criteria from dozens of so-called queryables as specified in the OGC implementation specification Catalogue Service for Web 2.0.2, including the ISO Application Profile 1.0. The typical examples are freetext search, resource type, area of interest, scale extent, responsible authority, time period etc.
  4. Since (Open)Micka provides services, it may be easily connected and powering a third party application.
  • Display the results
    • In a human friendly way on a Web page and/or in an application for mobile environments.
    • In an XML-based source code.
    • Through a semantic approach when using the GeoDCAT RDF syntax.
  • Import metadata
    • From another server having its
      interface compliant to the OGC implementation specification Catalogue Service
      for Web 2.0.2.
    • From another repository when a
      connector is developed.
  • Create metadata
    • According to a currently support metadata profile: ISO 19115, ISO 19119, INSPIRE, Dublin Core, Feature Catalogue.
    • According to a user-defined structure.
  • Validate metadata
    • According to the linked XML schemas.
    • According to a Schematron pattern.
    • According to user-defined rules.
  • Publish metadata
    • In a user-friendly Web page through XML files.
    • As a Web service, with or without semantics.