Establishing individual ASDD nodes: Case 2

Note: this is a mythical case study (overview page explains further)

large organisation with several medium metadata collections; use existing Internet server machine; all of our Internet services are managed by our Internet Service Provider; dump documents from database, validate and transfer out to ISP; use freely available Z39.50 software; consultant does once-off installation and configuration, then ISP maintains services

Description of the organisation

We are a medium to large government organisation. We have our own spatial datasets (ie.g. GIS layers, aerial photography). We are also a coordinating organisation to provide metadata listings for other custodian agencies.

Expertise

We do have various in-house technical expertise. However, our Internet services are outsourced to our Internet Service Providers, so we rely on their expertise for that.

Our staff have experience in the field of metadata management. They also fully understand the role and operation of the ASDD. We have charge of developing our project plan and determining our requirements. We oversee the activities of our Application Service Providers.

Description of our metadata collections

We currently have three large metadata collections. One is entirely devoted to aerial photograhy for our area of operations. Another is datasets descriptions of the spatial data products that are publicly available from our organisation. The other node is a collection of various spatial data descriptions from diverse custodian organisations that are under our umbrella.

Metadata management

Note: Metadata management is a separately funded ongoing activity. We provide a simple overview of how we do it. No cost estimate is provided here. However, a component is included for preparing the metadata for indexing and delivery.

Our organisation and the other custodian agencies all use a freely available PC database and export the final set of updated XML documents. We then have an Application Service Provider to validate the set of XML documents against the relevant standards and produce the presentation documents. We receive a compressed archive of the final metadata documents which we then review before passing on to our ISP.

Whenever we need to update one of our metadata collection, then we simply provide the compressed archive of new or updated metadata documents to our ISP. They install the documents and re-index the metadata. These documents have already been validated, so our ISP does not need to worry about that aspect.

Internet server capabilities

We have an existing Internet server that runs our high-traffic web server. This is outsourced and completely managed by our Internet Service Provider.

Our metadata document collections and Z39.50 server are now on this same machine. So we did not need to set up an additional server machine.

The machine is an ordinary SUN UNIX server - a hefty server is not required.

Description of our Z39.50 solution

We use freely available Z39.50 software. The Z39.50 server indexes the collection of static XML documents.

Our Z39.50 services are completely managed by our ISP. They install and configure the software. They update the software as required. Our ISP has staff who have educated themselves about Z39.50 services by following the extensive ASDD technical documentation. To initially set up the system, our ISP engaged a Z39.50 expert. This expert worked onsite for about two days to install and configure the software, to train the ISP staff, and to install the initial metadata collection.

Overview estimates of the resources required