Intuitive, OGC-Conformant Search for Spatial and Non-Spatial Data in a Web-Based Information

One goal of the German-Vietnamese research project WISDOM (Water-related Information System for the sustainable Development of the Mekong Delta) is to design and implement a web-based information system that serves as a sharing platform for scientists as well as local decision makers in Vietnam. It therefore must be capable to store a huge amount of spatial and non-spatial data, which are derived and produced within the project consortium to various research questions in the field of remote sensing, hydrology and hydraulics, water quality assessment, socio-economy and vulnerability assessment. The resulting data are spatial data, but also in-situ sensor observations, articles, reports and statistical data. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and International Standard Organization (ISO) propagate standards on how to describe spatial data (ISO19115 / 19139 metadata standards) and make the metadata descriptions available via a Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW). The work presented here has therefore two goals. The first goal is to describe both spatial and non-spatial data in WISDOM according to the ISO metadata standards, so that the data can be found in a standard-compliant CSW. To achieve this goal, much effort had been put into the definition of a metadata profile used throughout the project, which does not put too much leverage on the data producer and metadata author. The second goal is to design and implement a user friendly web-based interface that operates in a standard browser, so that users of different levels of experience can easily search and find data within the WISDOM system. During the search process a user can apply different filters intuitively to reduce the amount of data returned by the system. The user interface is kept simple and easy to understand, but still is very effective in data search. The applied filters, e.g. region of interest, theme or time, operate completely on the defined interface of a CSW and the metadata descriptions of the underlying data, so that this approach can be transferred to other systems as well