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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
- Make more reliable connections to AOOS, CeNCOOS, NDBC, and CO-OPS
- Add more details about harvest success rate to Catalog services pages
- 2013 Glider Days info
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 included in the 3.x release focus on enhancing the usability of the IOOS Catalog Dashboard (current Catalog homepage) and the IOOS Catalog Map. The largest enhancement will 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 in the 3.x release will be limited and further developed in the 4.0 release.
Additional enhancements will include improved search and data filtering, additional system monitoring (e.g. alert emails when platforms are added or removed, or when services are detected to be down for an extended (time TBD) duration), improved display of dataset metadata, and workflow improvements for using the Catalog map (e.g. data query, grouping of points, visualization of global footprints, z-order of datasets).
Long-term goals, included in the 4.0 release, include a fully conceptualized version of ‘IOOS by the Numbers’ updated automatically where possible, an API providing access to catalog data, and the addition of more robust data visualization.
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:
- 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...