open source basecamp

During the week of January 16-20, the core Geonetwork developers (including Camptocamp) met in Bennekom (Holland) for an intense week of software development.  The goal was to stabilize Geonetwork trunk for the approaching Geonetwork 2.8 release.  The goal was admirably achieved.  The core of Geonetwork is stable and ready for the release of 2.8.  The last order of business is to complete the new user interface for Geonetwork.

During the development of Geonetwork 2.8, a new user interface has been developed with modern web technologies and design.  The underlying implementation has been completed and final layout and UI polishing is being completed.  In the following few weeks the Geonetwork 2.8 Release Candidate 1 will be released.

The features of 2.8 include:

• A new default UI
• Improved performance and scalability
• Metadata versioning
• Subtemplates (for sharing common portions of metadata records)
• Improved search support for multilingual metadata
• New configuration management options for easier deployment to multiple servers
• Geoserver publishing integration
• Pessimistic locking for metadata to reduce the chance of losing work due to concurrent editing of multiple users
• Metadata editor suggestions.
• Pluggable metadata profiles
• Logo manager
• Search statistics
• Metadata Notification (allows service to register for notification when metadata change)
• New harvesters
• PDF output of metadata
• Improved database connection pooling
• Virtual CSW endpoints
• Document and field boosting to better control the relevance of searches
• Metadata lifecycle

For the complete list and details of each feature see Geonetwork Proposals

Thanks to Camptocamp, GeoCat and Swisstopo for making this work possible.