Geographic Data Discovery Service

What's New with the Discovery Service

Date: June 11th, 2008
Title: Version 2.6.15 of Discovery Service Released

The principle focus of this new version is improvement to the information the application provides to web search engines like Google and Yahoo. Detailed pages provided to search engines will now have the Discovery dataset Name value copied to the Title tag, and the Discovery description value copied to the Meta name=description tag.  This means that when people search with tools like Google and response returned will better formed.

Rather than seeing a response like this from Google

ILMB Discovery Service
BC Community Watersheds. This 1:20000. scale inventory contains digital maps of ... Attribute data for community watersheds can be downloaded into a ...
aardvark.gov.bc.ca/apps/metastar/metadataDetail.do?recordUID=3575&recordSet=ISO19115 - 107k

We will see something like this

GeoBC Data Discovery: BC Community Watersheds
This 1:20,000. scale inventory contains digital maps of community watershed boundaries. The watershed boundaries show the location of watersheds that supply communities with....
aardvark.gov.bc.ca/apps/metastar/metadataDetail.do?recordUID=3575&recordSet=ISO19115 - 107k

With this revision the application name was also revised from ILMB Discovery Service to Geographic Data Discovery Service to better describe the metadata content which the application is focused on. 
Other changes that were made in this release:

Date: June 11th, 2008
Title: What's New Page for Discovery Service

Welcome! We have moved our news items and created a new News page for all our "What's New With The Discovery Service" items. You can also keep up to date by finding information on the upcoming enhancements our team will be working towards for our future releases. If you have any suggestions or feedback please contact Greg Lawrance.

Date: April 29th, 2008
Title: Protocol Z39.50 Issue Resolved

Z39.50 is a computer data exchange protocol by which our metadata service shares its information with other metadata search services like the Canadian Federal Geoconnections Discovery Portal or the US Federal Geographic Data Committee Geospatial Data Clearinghouse.  As a result of migrating from one server to another the Discovery Service application was not providing response to Z39.50 requests.  We have now resolved this issue and our metadata is once again available using the Z39.50 protocol.

Date: April 3rd, 2008
Title: Metadata Content from Discovery Indexed by Search Engines

Many more people know and like to use tools like Google Search than the Discovery Service search interface. With this in mind a change was recently made to the Discovery Service to ensure the custodial investment in spatial data documented via metadata is widely available to search engines like Yahoo and Google.  To make this happen GeoBC implemented a dynamic XML sitemap for all public content.  A sitemap is what a search engine robot like GoogleBot uses to find content to include in its search repository. Go ahead and give it a try and search for your record using a custom search in Google. You will still find the Discovery Service search interface more useful when trying to narrow your search, but, until we make further improvements to the Discovery Service search function the speed of Google is a welcome enhancement.

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Upcoming Enhancements

We are working on improving the Discovery Service for our future releases. Some of the improvements we are investigating include:

  • A faster search response.
  • A simplified interface for mandatory record entry.
  • A direct linkage from the Discovery Service records to our production database data dictionary content. This will enable users to get attribute names, types and descriptions directly from the production database.
  • A "What's New" page that includes the twenty most recent records within the Discovery Service.
  • Direct linkages to our visualization and web map services like iMapBC, KML, WMS.
  • Improved interoperability with Data Distribution Service.

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Known Issues

Interoperability between Discovery Service and Data Distribution Service

Users who select the ‘ORDER’ button for a record they have found in the Discovery Service may find that they encounter an error when they are taken to the Distribution Service (where data is available for download).  This may occur when you are attempting to access a dataset which is only available to authorized users or where you have more than one browser window open. We are investigating improvements.
Unique Metadata URL Not Always Populated

There is a problem that occurs intermittently for people who are creating new metadata records. It does not affect people using the Discovery Service to search for data.

Every metadata record must have a URL in the metadata that identifies it. Metadata missing a URL will not be able to be found in a search.

To resolve a missing Unique Metadata URL:

  • After creating and saving a metadata record, scroll down to the bottom of the Identification page and look at the field Unique Metadata URL. If there is no value there, you have encountered this issue.
  • Sometimes, this problem can be resolved by clicking the Duplicate button and thus creating a copy of the record.
  • Confirm if the record now has a Unique Metadata Record URL. If so, delete the original record and remove the words “duplicate” in the Title and Feature Name fields in the new record. If there is still no URL, please notify GEOBC.ServiceDesk@gov.bc.ca and a system administrator will enter one manually.

You can access the Discovery Application via this link.

If you have any suggestions or comments, please contact Greg Lawrance.