Dear all,
We're happy to announce a new release of GeoNetwork opensource v2.4.3. This is a minor release, but with some good improvements that may be of interest to you!
Main things that have changed in this release:

- INSPIRE support, including a specific search form (disabled by default, enable in the config-gui.xml configuration file)
- CSW ISO profile updates and test suite
- GeoServer upgrade to v2.0.1 with the REST API and SLD Styler included
- Search speed improvements (more to come in v2.6.0, due in August 2010!)
- Added Portuguese language and improvements for others

The rest can be read in the changes log file.
Thanks to our dedicated developer team and supporting community! Enjoy!

http://geonetwork-opensource.org/software/geonetwork_opensource/releases/2.4.3

Or directly to the files:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/geonetwork/files/

GeoNetwork opensource is at the core of the Dutch National Geo Registry (NGR), providing access to the authoritative GIS resources available in The Netherlands. The registry therefor by default also provides the OGC CSW 2.0.2 catalogue interface. This interface allows developers to build custom client applications that access and use these resources in their applications. One such client application has now been build by ESRI Netherlands for the ArcMap and ArcGIS Explorer products. The required download and installation instructions can be found here (in Dutch) and below in English.

I thought I provide an English translation for the installation instructions so that others can also benefit from this work.

I would like to announce the release of GeoNetwork opensource 2.4.2.
This is a minor release for the project and includes a number of critical fixes to the 2.4 version. The changes are:

158: CSW harvesting. Send preferred outputSchema from Capabilties in requests
155: CSW harverting only supports 2.0.2 servers
156:Proxy server is not used for all CSW harvesting operations (also fixed OGCWXS harvester)
Fix for ticket 125: Increase perfomance of showing metadata executing increase popularity asynchronously
Fixed keyword identifier with no #. See #147.
Close existing Lucene searcher. Fixed type issue.
Case insensitive UUID handling
Fixed bad attribute name. Thanks Richard Walker.
Fixed javascript error with IE8 (#145). Thanks to Christopher and Andrew.
Fixed UUID generation when inserting metadata with option : "Generate UUID ..." (#144).
updated change log
Inline documentation

The software can be downloaded here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/geonetwork/

GeoNetwork opensource ( http://geonetwork-opensource.org ) is a standards based geospatial catalog application that helps people and organizations to organize and publish their geospatial data through the web. It is currently used in numerous Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives across the world.

Today we made a bug fix release that fixes some issues found in the 2.4 release of 21 July 2009. You can find the new release at https://sourceforge.net/projects/geonetwork/.

The changes are:

- Corrected Dutch translation
- Fixed force rebuild index on startup.
- Fixed hardcoded english strings in javascript. Use the translate(tagName) function and the js attribute in loc file now.
- Added login support for CSW operations from CSW test page to easily test transactions.
- Translation fix. Thanks Jean Pommier.
- Added doc to disabled caching and use Saxon.
- #141 Fixed XSL compilation error for RSS services (due to additional bracket). Thanks to Roger and Jean.
- Fixed typo in codelists (#140).
- Fixed category search menu. See #139
- Fixed keyword autocompletion. Thanks Richard Walker. #134

We're proud to announce the release of GeoNetwork opensource 2.4.0. This is a major release for the project.

GeoNetwork opensource (http://geonetwork-opensource.org) is a standards based geospatial catalog application that helps people and organizations to organize and publish their geospatial data through the web. It is currently used in numerous Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives across the world.

Important improvements have been made to ease of use, advanced metadata editing, performance and interoperability making it one of the most advanced, if not the most advanced geospatial metadata catalog available on the market today.

The software provides an easy to use web interface to search geospatial data across multiple catalogs, combine distributed map services in the embedded map viewer, send annotated interactive maps to friends by email, publish geospatial data using the online metadata editing tools and optionally the embedded GeoServer map server. Administrators have the option to manage user and group accounts, configure the server through web based and desktop utilities and schedule metadata harvesting from other catalogs.

This entry is an attempt to get more structure in my head and get more feedback and insight from others that hopefully leads to a solution worthwhile implementing.
Sean Gillies left a comment (eaten by the moderation filter) on the first entry and more directions in his blog entry.
I read some of the documents on the ORE site and did not find a solution there yet.

The problem

There are a couple of aspects that I need to write down to explain the problem faced when working on a general solution for linking OGC services in news feeds.

OGC Services in practice

OGC services allow clients (users or better, applications) to construct a URL with some variables and get something in return; A map graphic for instance from a Web Map Service. The workflow on such service has been designed so that the client first does a GetCapabilities, parses that document and starts interacting with the service to actually get something done. Drawing a map for instance, identify an object, interrogate a catalog and so on and so forth. I will stick to Web Map Services in this blog and may thus miss the ball when it comes to other OGC services ;)

Today I finished some work on the RSS output of GeoNetwork opensource that should allow people to search a metadata catalog for OGC web map services, KML, data for download and whatever else someone decided to publish in ISO19115 formatted metadata.

Providing a search interface with an RSS output allows a user to store his query as a newsfeed and automatically see when there's new content matching his query. Adding the custom links allows some clever clients to exploit the services described in the metadata.

The idea is not new, and we've had a lot of discussions on IRC, email and face to face meetings within the GeoNetwork and OSGeo communities. What I implemented in the end is a common output format in the form of an RSS feed with links that point to the W*S content type and a URL to the service. The service URL should provide enough info for clients to parse it and decide what approach to take: just continue using GetMap, or take the base URL and do a GetCapabilities request first.