GeoNetwork 4.0 – alpha

Camptocamp is happy to announce that the Geonetwork community has released the first version of Geonetwork 4.0: an alpha test edition! It is a great step forward for this solution which has completely revamped the core search engine to push the metadata search and indexing to the next level.

Geonetwork’s next major release dream started back in the days at Bolsena codesprint some years ago, when we wanted to move the search engine to a modern/next generation index software. We made the first tests in Solr, but we finally chose ElasticSearch as it seemed the best option for GeoNetwork indexing engine.
The main 2 goals of this move are:

• Better search experience
• Scalability

The main focus is to improve the user experience and Elastic Search provides the best tools to make you find what you are looking for. The search and facets are completely customizable (tree, based on query, OR/AND, negative, histogram ..) so you can design the best UIs to drive the user into the catalog. Auto suggestion, speed, everything has been improved to make the metadata world a bit less cruel.

Elastic Search also shines compared to Lucene by its scalability, you can use it as a cluster to replicate your index and guarantee a very high availability service. We can then imagine an architecture based on microservices, dedicated to the indexing and the search, background tasks and so on.

The road to the final 4.0 release is still long, we have to port some remaining features to the new search engine but you can already try and test this alpha test version to get the first impression and give some feedback to the community.We want to push the experience further with next final 4.0 so keep in touch with the development to see what’s coming next.

Find all technical details about the alpha test version at Github.