[thredds] GI-Cat distributed catalog services package

• To: THREDDS community <thredds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Unidata Staff <staff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Subject: [thredds] GI-Cat distributed catalog services package
• From: Ben Domenico <Ben@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:01:06 -0600

Hi all,

During a visit to the ESSI Labs, I was given a demonstration of GI-cat,
which is an open source package, which


   - "Allows clients to discover and evaluate geoinformation resources over
   a federation of data sources;
   - Allows different clients to use the service, as it publishes different
   catalog interfaces.

A data provider can deploy his/her own GI-cat instance, grouping together
disparate data sources, to accommodate his/her user needs."

As noted on the web description, it can be accessed by a via a number of
different standards-based catalog interfaces, so many clients are available
in addition to the GI-Go catalog/search client of ESSI labs.

*ESSI Labs page:*
http://zeus.pin.unifi.it/joomla/

GI-cat page:
http://zeus.pin.unifi.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/GIcat

GI-go page:
http://zeus.pin.unifi.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/GIgo/WebHome

To me, it seems to me an excellent complement to THREDDS Data Server
technologies.  During the demo, we were able to connect to a TDS service on
the NCDC NOMADS server simply by entering the URL via the convenient
configuration interface.  This appears to be a very good solution for
filling a gap between THREDDS (and many other) data services and
standards-based search systems.

-- Ben