[Freegis-list] Clearinghouse

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Mon, Apr 01, 2002 at 12:49:18PM +0200, Alexander Pucher wrote:
> My personal intention (that's why I posted my question) is simple. We 
> have a lot of geodata in our dept., stored in several ArcGIS personal 
> geodatabases. All I want to do is to set up a web-based  intranet search 
> engine, so that dept. members can search the available data. 

So me this sound like the key technocal point for you will be to 
find a good way to access the data in the databases. Let me
elaborate on this a bit.

Personally I do not have much experience with what to expect when
you write "ArcGIS personal geodatabase". I also did not find good
information about the underlying technology searching the web for a
couple of minutes. This is something you have to find out.

Let's assume the geo and attribute data is in a DBMS based on MS Access.
As long as the data is in there, you cannot manipulate it easily
from a complete Free Software setting. Thus you probably want to
extract the data in order gain back control over it.

I'm not aware of software that can work directly on the files of MS Access, 
but I did not look for this kind of software so far.
Assuming you are stuck with going over ms access interfaces
running ms windows you probably can utilise the com interface.
Python windows will enable you to do this and write a script you 
might run non-interactively. Certainly there are other ways.

Once you have access to the data in the database you can set up
periodical scripts to collect the data you want and transfer them in your 
simple database (e.g. text file based, postgresql or mysql).
Adding a web and search interface to such a database is an easy
exercise you find many tutorials for utilising Free Software (e.g.
zope, php3, Quixote).

> In a first 
> step, it is not needed that users can actually download the datafiles-a 
> metadata result list of the queried data would be enough. I think, this 
> is not really a clearinghouse, for it would only have one peer.
> 
> Changes are good that some of my colleagues will try to set up a 
> ESRI-based system, but my intention is to do it with free software.

Please report back what you were able to do and what you've found out.

-- 
Professional Service around Free Software                (intevation.net)  

If freegis is useful for you, consider paying for the service:
	http://freegis.org/about-paying.en.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 248 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.intevation.de/pipermail/freegis-list/attachments/20020401/1f3372e6/attachment.bin