MapCat is a project to develop an architecture for an easy-to-build and maintain catalog of place-based information for use by collaborators on a project. The idea being that if collaborators have a simple way to structure their collective data resources on their working file system, and if they have have simple tools for creating and maintaining simple metadata for their project collection as a whole, and the elements that it may include; then the project team will be more productive, and project assets will be more valuable during the life of the project. This will provide an incentive for project leaders and project participants to or
As a side-effect of this the assets colleced in the course of the project will be more easily understood, and simplified for archiving and reuse by the project team or others at a later date.
One aspect of this project that makes it a bit different from Server-Based catalogging tools is that in the course of a project when data are collected and the information about sources and purposes is fresh in the mind of the collector the collection is being organized on a filesystem. This is also how the data are used and shared by project team members. This is why we think that making a tool for creating and maintaining metadata on the filesystem with the data may be more likely to be used as opposed to a model that expects the metadata to be created after the project is over for the purposes of long-term archiving. When metadata creation is part of the process of data compilation, then that metadata can be part of a catalog that allows project participants and their supervisors to browse and understand project assets as they are collected.
The metadata form can record hierarchal relationships between the Parent Collection, Sub-Collections and Collection Elements, and these links can yiled a hierachal tree of metadata formed through the creation of individual files. This tree acn also be traversed by a crawler that can compile a more detaield set of indexes that can be used to do detailed searches on the project. For an example of such a system, developed using pre-xml FGDC-tab-indent formatted metadata, see MCP: The metadata Collection Parser.
For an initial stab at creating a tree with MapCat, would be to add a field that will allow the user to identify the metadata records for immediate child collections of the project, and for the metadata of the project's root metadata document. When the metadata is saved as HTML, this will allow a user to traverse the metadata tree using a web browser. When the metatada elements are saved as KML the bounding boxes can be portrayed on a map, and the hierachy tree can be formed by including network links form one document to its children. (yes this works even with local files!) THis makes the tree browsable as a nested set of folders in your Google Earth Places Panel.
There are many ways of skinning this MapCat. The project was begun with an orientation to client-side processing. Advantages of this were seen as portability and simplicity and also as a challenge to learn about the latest in dynamic html and xml processing. But if collaborators want to develop this in other architectures, their contributions would certainly be welcome.