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Roadmap
This page is intended to serve as a long term planning tool for Catalog enhancements. It should be considered a statement of goals and objectives and not a commitment to funding. We publish this page to encourage an open source community to commit to Catalog development and to facilitate planning by program management.
Milestones for the IOOS Catalog are listed in the GitHub Repository (https://github.com/ioos/catalog/milestones).
These versions are not included here. They are remnants of earlier development efforts by the IOOS program office. It would be logical to ignore these previous attempts and not muddle the semantic versioning of the current catalog but we choose to retain them to maintain some consistency with old program literature. Developers and other members of the open source community should ignore them and consider v3.0.0 the effective first public release.
Initial release of the new IOOS Catalog.
Following the release of the IOOS Catalog 3.0, several immediate goals, related to improving the user experience, the site workflow, and fixing bugs, were identified. These goals were addressed in the v3.1 release on 29 Aug Details can be found here: https://github.com/ioos/catalog/milestones/Version%203.1:%20Fix%20Bugs%20and%20Immediate%20User%20Experience/Workflow%20Issues
Short term goals to make the catalog more accessible and user friendly, included in the v3.2 on 30 Sep 2014. These changes included a completed overhaul of the current catalog landing page at catalog.ioos.gov. The previous home page provided a dashboard-like view of the number of services and datasets contained within IOOS, but it was too technical for a casual user. The previous landing became the ‘IOOS Catalog Inventory' and was replaced with an IOOS Catalog landing page containing thumbnails that link users to a number of different entry points into IOOS. These links include:
- ‘IOOS by the Numbers’ - an overview of IOOS statistics that highlights the significant capabilities of IOOS and it’s importance to the metocean data community. The ‘IOOS by the Numbers’ concept is simple to start, but will continue to evolve with subsequent catalog releases.
- The IOOS Catalog Inventory - a reworking of the current homepage
- The IOOS Catalog Map - a direct link to the Catalog map with a running count of the number of datasets and services.
- Gliders: a glider specific page containing info about the number of Glider Days per year and links to several Glider resources.
- ‘Featured Maps’ - paged direct links to and descriptions of map-based websites developed by IOOS RA’s and federal partners. Contains a thumbnail of each featured map.
- Download Help: A link providing instructions for downloading data (a longer term goal is to allow data download directly from the site) including instructions for accessing DAP, WMS, SOS, & WCS
- A social media feed connecting to IOOS related Twitter feeds (IOOS + RAs + Federal Partners) and providing links to follow on Twitter and Like on FB.
- A news feed
The idea behind the newly designed homepage is to make IOOS accessible to a variety of users from Program Office managers that need to present IOOS DMAC to technical users that need to discover data.
Other fixes included ensuring that both federal partners and regional associations are equally represented on the various Catalog pages
V3.2.2 [Harvesting Improvements, Data Stats Updates, Small UI updates] (https://github.com/ioos/catalog/milestones/Version%203.2.2)
The main motivation for this version is to improve the reporting of harvesting results and to update the reliability of various SOS service harvests. Several small UI changes have also been induced.
- Make more reliable connections to AOOS, CeNCOOS, NDBC, and CO-OPS
- Add more details about harvest success rate to Catalog services pages
- Short-term Glider fixes: add 2013 Glider Days info, remove Glider_DAC_2 from map categories
- Update IOOS by the numbers static content
- Small UI improvements
V3.3 [Improvements to the catalog map that directly benefit glider display] (https://github.com/ioos/catalog/milestones/Version%203.3%20Improvements%20to%20the%20catalog%20map%20that%20directly%20benefit%20glider%20display)
Version 3.3 will focus on tighter integration between GliderDAC and the IOOS Catalog
V3.4 [Non-Map UI Improvements] (https://github.com/ioos/catalog/milestones/Version%203.4%20Non-Map%20UI%20Improvements)
Version 3.4 will focus on the non-map related pages of catalog.ioos.us. These improvements will include updating IOOS by the Numbers to a dynamic display, clarifying the presentation of dataset types on the Catalog Inventory page, improving presentation of dataset and service metadata, and improving site navigation and workflows.
V3.5 [Catalog Map Improvements] (https://github.com/ioos/catalog/milestones/Version%203.5:%20Catalog%20Map%20Improvements)
Version 3.5 will include many medium-term goals for improving the user's catalog map experience, including adding the ability to filter data layers listed in the TOC, improving the display of data assets on the map, and improving access to dataset metadata.
Of great importance after addressing the short term goals is replacement of the previous catalog on the IOOS web site (http://www.ioos.noaa.gov/catalog/welcome.html) with an accurate and automatically updated depiction of IOOS-related datasets and services and a clear entry-point into the main catalog.ioos.us site.
Other medium term goals include visualization of data either directly in the Catalog Map or in an associated map developed specifically for data visualization. The amount of data made available for visualization will be limited at first and further developed in subsequent releases.
Additional enhancements could include improved search and data filtering and additional system monitoring (e.g. alert emails when platforms are added or removed, or when services are detected to be down for an extended period.
Finally, the new sensor map should be, which provides an alternative view of federal observing systems should be integrated with the Catalog.
A number of additional long-term goals have also been set for FY15. The issues tackled in FY15 may include the following items, which will be further prioritized as Catalog development in FY14 progresses:
- API providing access to catalog data
- Data discovery via the catalog including integration with the OGCSearch tool, faceted search based on IOOS controlled vocabularies, free text search with a google like interface and based on elastic search or some other back end indexing scheme.
- Operational implementation of the compliance checker and provision of automated feedback back to data providers.
- Inclusion of biological data types
- Exploration of alternative options for operational hosting of catalog.
- Experiment with CKAN (or GeoPortal/pyCSW) as a way to incorporate the CS/W features from NGDC into Catalog products.
- Publication of select views or layers via a service interface. For example, a weekly updated layer showing the locations of “IOOS Stations (def TBD)” served via a WMS/WFS interface provided by a parallel Geoserver. Note, the use of Geoserver is just an idea not a requirement. The requirement is to serve select layers via W*S, the Geoserver is just introduced as a convenient and easy way to accomplish that. There may be other ways.
Other wild ideas...