Floss in Cadastre and Land Registration

The need for a geospatial catalog

How often do you find yourself searching for an administrative boundaries 

 layer  you can use to map your statistics? Or when was the last time you down-

loaded tons of satellite images freely available on the Internet to convert them 

from an obscure HDF format into a GeoTiff before you could simply see it as a 

backdrop in your GIS? There’s a good chance you used your time in a more pro-

ductive way!

Finding and accessing geospatial information from trusted sources can be a 

time consuming, expensive and sometimes frustrating experience. It can be just as 

difficult to find reliable reference data within your own organization or company 

as it is from others.

If we were trying to find information in written works such as books or journal 

 articles, we often simply search the web using Google, Yahoo or other search en-

gines. For more specific searches we may use a library catalog and probably con-

nect with other library catalogs from around the world through the Internet. 

GeoNetwork opensource (or just GeoNetwork from here) helps us to describe, 

publish and find geospatial information. GeoNetwork is in essence, a digital library 

that enables you to find and access geospatial information. It allows data provid-

ers to systematically describe both their data and services to distribute it. A cata-

log of data and distribution services can then be published through the Internet 

for use by anyone trying to find geospatial information. Not only can they find that 

information, they may also be able to obtain it through a data distribution service 

listed in the catalog: on-the-fly data conversion and re-projection have made  direct 

data access from a distribution service a viable option for those with good Inter-

net access.

By providing a catalog for data and distribution services and facilities to 

 exchange information with other catalogs as part of a network, GeoNetwork 

helps to organize and share geospatial information within and between the inter-

operable, spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) that many stakeholders are starting to 

build. Beyond the formal SDI domain, the information is also made accessible to 

the informal  domain of the World Wide Web.

The GeoNetwork project started in order to address the internal need of the 

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to more effective-

ly use geographic information collected and maintained in the agency. Several 

 attempts had preceded the project, resulting in a desktop database application 

and a derived web based catalog. In the mean time international standards to de-

scribe and publish geographic data emerged as well as a need to share the exist-

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ing information between physically disconnected offices, projects and sister agen-

cies. The need for a new catalog solution was born.