The GeoNetwork opensource project is a catalog application facilitating the discovery of data, services and applications within any local, regional, national or global "Spatial Data Infrastructure" (SDI). GeoNetwork is an established technology - recognized as an OSGeo Project and a member of the FOSS4G community since the early days.

The GeoNetwork team would love to share what we have been up to and talk about the different projects that have contributed functionality to the software during the last twelve months. Our rich ecosystem of schema plugins continues to improve; with national teams pouring fixes, improvements and new features into the core application.

GeoNetwork is the backend of the European INSPIRE Geoportal and over 80% of national geospatial catalog end points for INSPIRE. We will discuss a number of developments that are foreseen to evolve easy access to geospatial open data and other open data. How do we work with expert communities to make sure GeoNetwork does what it is expected to do?

We will also talk about the UI revamp through the geonetwork-ui framework, and the new perspectives it could bring to your catalogs. Progress of our main branches (4.4.x), and release schedule.

Attend this presentation for the latest from the GeoNetwork community and this vibrant technology platform.

geOrchestra is a long-established open-source Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI), grounded in the pillars of OsGeo:
- GeoNetwork
- GeoServer
- MapStore
- OpenLayers

This solution has proven to be exceptionally robust, having been deployed at various levels including national, regional, institutional, academic, and research centers. As the landscape of metadata management transitions, embracing open data catalogs, data-centric usages, and modern applications, SDIs must evolve and adapt to this new paradigm.

In our presentation, we will explore how the geOrchestra community, with support from the GeoNetwork community, has modernized its technology stack and offerings. This includes:
- A comprehensive system for data ingestion and preparation.
- A collaborative editor for open and geo-metadata.
- A unified portal for accessing both open data and geo-data.
- A versatile API that addresses a range of data use cases, including searching, paging, processing, analyzing, and aggregating datasets.
- Enhanced capabilities for data visualization.

These advancements collectively contribute to the development of a sophisticated open-source data platform, incorporating a streamlined data ingestion system and more.

For data platforms, where thousands of datasets are stored and documented, interoperability is essential. These platforms often gather records from external sources, and they above all want to make their own data widely exploitable.

In the world of INSPIRE and geospatial data, rigid XML standards have been the foundation of interoperability for many years. This is now changing as we notice a strong push towards another kind of standards: semantic metadata.

DCAT is a very good example: at its core, it is a list of concepts and relations that can be used to describe multiple collections of datasets. Because it does not impose a formal way to set up those concepts, metadata expressed in DCAT can have many different forms.

This trend imposes great challenges to long-standing solutions such as GeoNetwork, which are built on strictly-structured XML formats.

In this talk we will showcase a promising approach made by leveraging the versatility of the GeoNetwork-UI toolkit, a sister project of GeoNetwork built using modern technologies. GeoNetwork-UI has a different way of reading and outputting metadata, and implementing a semantic-capable module opens up many new and exciting perspectives: wider interoperability outside of the geospatial ecosystem, description of relationships between resources across the network, better indexation of the catalog content by search engines etc.

This talk will first give a general overview of the changes ongoing in the INSPIRE ecosystem and the push for new interoperability standards, and then showcase the existing implementation in GeoNetwork-UI and what it is capable of.

Please keep in mind that the talk will be quite technical, and that the word "metadata" will be pronounced more than once! ;)

Looking forward to see you there!