Extended Regions

Date	2012/09/14
Contact(s)	​Jesse Eichar
Last edited
Status	Proposed
Assigned to release	2.9.x
Resources	Jesse personal time
Code	​https://github.com/jesseeichar/core-geonetwork/tree/improvement/regions

Overview

This proposal intends to extend the existing Regions API with the following features:

• Add category for each region so they can be displayed in categories (for example continent, country, province)
• Add API for searching regions based:
  • name
  • category
  • bbox
• Add optional geometry for each region (in addition to bbox)
• integrate into XmlSearch and Csw so that the region id can be used to look up the geometry of the region for a spatial filter
• Add a configurable strategy object for that allows the region implementation to be easily pluggable. For example it might be based on a table in the database or wfs

Proposal Type

• Type: Improvement
• App: Geonetwork
• Module: Web

Links

• Email discussions:
• IRC discussions:
• Related work:

Voting History

• None as yet

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Proposal

The Regions will be backwards compatible but will simply extend the functionality. Currently the Regions API provides a list of regions, each with a unique id. Each region has translated labels and a bounding box. The proposal will extend that API. The new API will be:

• Get
  • Params
    • id - required
  • Example Response:

    <response>
      <record>
        <id>338</id>
        <north>38.2</north>
        <south>-34.6</south>
        <west>-17.3</west>
        <east>51.1</east>
        <label>
          <eng>Africa</eng>
          <fre>Afrique</fre>
          <ger>Afrika</ger>
          <spa>Africa</spa>
          <rus>Africa</rus>
          <por>Africa</por>
          <chi>Africa</chi>
          <dut>Afrika</dut>
          <nor>Africa</nor>
          <fin>Africa</fin>
          <ara>Africa</ara>
          <ita>Africa</ita>
        </label>
        <category>continent</category>
        <hasGeom>false</hasGeom>
      </record>
    </response>
    

• List
  • Params
    • category - optional
    • bbox (minx,maxx,miny,maxy, srs) - optional. SRS is optional and assumed to be EPSG:4326
    • label - searches the labels for regions that contain the text in this parameters - optional
  • Example Response

    <regions count="1">
      <region>
        <id>country.1</id>
        <label>
          <eng>France</eng>
        </label>
      </region>
    </regions>
    

• GetGeom - will return the geometry for the region. If the geometry does not have a geometry then the bbox will be used to construct a polygon.
  • Params
    • id - required (if multiple are provided then multiple geometries will be returned)
    • simplified - optional (if present and true then the geometry will be a simplified version. Some implementations may ignore this hint and return full geometry)
  • Example Response:

    <response>
      <geom id="2"> MULTIPOLYGON (((30 20, 10 40, 45 40, 30 20)), ((15 5, 40 10, 10 20, 5 10, 15 5)))</geom>
      <geom id="3"> MULTIPOLYGON (((30 20, 10 40, 45 40, 30 20)), ((15 5, 40 10, 10 20, 5 10, 15 5)))</geom>
    </response>
    

The XmlSearch API will be modified so the geom parameter can either be WKT or have the form: region:id, where id is the id of the region to use as a geometry. If the region has a geometry then that geometry will be loaded otherwise the bbox will be used to create a polygon geometry.

The CatalogSearcher (part of Csw GetRecords) will be modified to replace elements with the attribute gml:id which have the form: region:id

The actual implementation will consist of the services and a strategy object that can be configured the geonetwork configuration files. The intention is that for a particular application the strategy object can be implemented and configured for use. The default implementation will be the current implementation factored out into the strategy object.

Backwards Compatibility Issues

none

Risks

Participants

• As above