Hi Greg:

Here at the University of Michigan we have developed a product called DLXS,
which I believe you guys have.  Since you probably know a bit about DLXS, I
will use DLXS language to explain what we have done with our FGDC metadata.
If this does not make sense to you, I'd be happy to clarify.

Well, in DLXS there is a class called bibclass. What I have done is
sub-classed bibclass to handle FGDC metadata.  Noticed the BibClass subclass
FgdcBC.pm.  There is also a BibApp subclass called GisBibApp.pm.  This is in
your DLXS code.

The metadata came to us in FGDC format, and we basically kept it that way,
but we also added a few Bibclass tags, and some specific UM tags.  We did
this using scripts to prepare the metadata for bibclass.  The script are in
DXLSROOT/bin/g/gistools and their names are something like this
fixfile_datapre_collid.

For some of our FGDC collections we have datasets that users can download.
The datasets reside in a server different from the server where bibclass
runs, and as part of our metadata preparation we add a bit of metadata
containing a simple cgi that can be used to download the datasets.  You can
find the 2 cgis used for this in DLXSROOT/cgi/g/gismgr.  One is called
giszipfiles and the other is giszipfiles_public.  One is used to download
restricted datasets and the other is used for public datasets.

Another programmer (no longer here at UM) developed a java applet that
allows users to graphically select a region of the earth to perform
coordinate searches.  It works rather well, but has a limitation of how many
collections can be searched simultaneously.  I believe the limit is 9.  This
applet has an interface to my bibclass subclass.  I don't believe this code
is delivered with DLXS, but if you are interested, I can get it for you.

In the Bibclass subclass used for FGDC metadata there is a connection to a
GIS MySQL database that contains the coordinate metadata for each FGDC item.
This allows us to easily perform numeric searches.  Something we could not
do with xpat without a lot of extra work.  The database also contains some
other metadata that is primarily displayed on the page that displays all the
FGDC collections we host ( the group page ).

There is a cgi I developed to help us manage the metadata.  It lives in
DLXSROOT/cgi/g/gismgr, and it's called metamgr.

If you are interested in pursuing this further, I can give you more
specifics.  If you wish to take a look at what we did go to:

http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/b/bib/bib-idx?g=gisall

Hope this helps.
Jose


-----Original Message-----
From: gmarch [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 8:10 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: FGDC Related Projects

Hello,

I am curious to know if any DLF partners are actively involved with FGDC 
metadata related projects?

Thank you,

Greg

Gregory March
Graduate Research Assistant
Map Library
15 Hoskins Library
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996
(865)974-4315
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