| 45 | * Speeding up spatial indexing using PostGIS: !GeoNetwork uses a shapefile to hold spatial extents for searches that contain spatial queries eg. touch, intersect, contains, overlap etc. At present only the CSW service uses the spatial index for these queries, the web search interface uses boxes and !Lucene. The spatial index needs to be maintained when records are added and deleted through import, harvesting, massive delete etc. Unfortunately the shapefile is not efficient for this purpose as the number of records in the catalog goes over 40,000 odd. In particular as the mechanism for deleting extents from the shapefile uses an attribute of the extent and these are not indexable meaning that there is a considerable cost for maintenance operations on the shapefile. |