GeoNetwork Configuration

GeoNetwork is a catalog application to manage spatially referenced resources, thus is a strategic technology for all geospatial application. Purpose of this page is to explain how to configure a GeoNetwork service instance in order to fulfill the needs of gCube environment. Please refer to its official website for further configuration details and more comprehensive documentation.

Installation

GeoNetwork version adopted by the gCube infrastructure is 2.8.0 , available here.

Prerequisites are :

• java7 jre sun
• apache tomcat 7
• postgres 9
• postgis2

In order to configure GeoNetwork to use postgis jdbc connection to the local database, please refer to official documentation.

Please, note that the jdbc url to the database must have the form jdbc:postgis://<HOST>:<PORT>/<DATABASE_NAME>, other wise the spatial metadata catalog is created as a shapefile, which may cause a loss of performance.

Security

To reproduce visibility and security means of the gCube infrastructure, the security module of GeoNetwork need to be configured accordingly to the scope(s) in which it is registered in. Please note that the following conventions needs to be maintained according to the infrastructure state.

Groups

For each scope in which the GeoNetwork instance is registered in, the administrator must create a group with the same name of the scope.

I.e. Let's assume our instance to be registered both in d4science.research-infrastructures.eu and in d4science.research-infrastructures.eu/gCubeApps. The GeoNetwork must be configured with at least the 2 groups d4science.research-infrastructures.eu and gCubeApps.

Users

Other then at least one administrator user, 2 users must be set for each and every scope in which the GeoNetwork is registered. The convention for these users name is :

• <SCOPE>_Public : used to publish / read metadata with a scope level visibility. Role of this user must be set as Editor for the groups in which it must have read access (The <SCOPE> group itself and every sub scope in case of VO or INFRASTRUCTURE);

<SCOPE>_Private : used to publish / read metadata with a private visibility. Role of this user must be set as as Editor for its <SCOPE> group.

For more clarity, let's say our GeoNetwork service is registered in d4science.research-infrastructures.eu/gCubeApps and in d4science.research-infrastructures.eu/gCubeApps/EcoligicalModelling scopes. As stated above in the group section, our service is supposed to be configured with at least the groups gCubeApps and EcologicalModelling. With these assumptions, these are the expected users :

• Administrator : user with administrator role
• gCubeApps_Private : Editor role in the group gCubeApps
• gCubeApps_Public : Editor role in the groups gCubeApps and EcologicalModelling
• EcologicalModelling_Private : Editor role in the group EcologicalModelling
• EcologicalModelling_Public : Editor role in the group EcologicalModelling

External resources

External OGC catalogs are managed via the harvesting facility offered by GeoNetwork. Please read the related documentation on the provider's official page.

Replica management

To improve robustness, reliability and performance of the SDI, one or more replica of a GeoNetwork service can be registered in a given scope.