O2A Documentation

Become a Content Provider ​

You are in the right place if you want to offer metadata for discovery in the portal. If you want to provide data products for the portal viewer, read more on viewers and the SDI Standard Operating Procedures.

To become a content provider for the portal, you need to provide metadata for your datasets, articles, or map projects. We support the de facto standardized OAI-PMH and the OGC CSW metadata harvesting interfaces. One of these standards must be accessible from the internet via HTTPS without authentication. If you don't have a catalog with standardized interfaces to your content yet, you might want to look at GeoNetwork or similar solutions. Different metadata schemas and profiles are supported, such as ISO19115, including customized ones. For special cases, other web resources can also be harvested, but are not preferred.

Checklist ​

Please verify that your repository contains at least the following metadata:

  • Title
  • Publication date
  • Temporal extent of data coverage (begin date, end date)
  • Geographical extent of data coverage (point, bounding box, polygon, or line string)
  • Author(s) (last name, first name, email, ORCID)
  • Abstract or description
  • Stable URL to splash page with additional information
  • DOI or Handle if available
  • Type of object (data, publication, article, map, etc.)

All kinds of annotated and related information are valuable, as they allow the portal to build elationships between harvested content:

  • Platform metadata, e.g., research vessel "Polarstern"
  • Device metadata, e.g., "Thermosalinograph"
  • Expedition or campaign metadata, e.g., "PS101"
  • Event metadata, e.g., "PS101/058-1" with date, description, latitude, and longitude
  • Measured parameters, e.g., temperature
  • DOI or Handle to individual data points/lines shown in viewer
  • URL reference(s) to related data services or downloads
  • URL reference(s) to additional information and related content

TIP

Read more about recommendations for metadata profiles and standardized interfaces.

Bernard, L., Degbelo, A., Grieb, J., Henzen, C., Heß, R., Klammer, R., Koppe, R., Lorenz, C., Müller, C., & Weiland, C. (2024). Recommendations for Earth System Sciences Metadata Provision. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10604587

Do you provide basic metadata and support standard interfaces? Great! Read about Harvesting and Indexing.

Harvesting and Indexing ​

We use an internal JSON metadata format (schema, example) for harmonized indexing and full-text search against an Elasticsearch cluster. Metadata is harvested regularly once per night from configured content providers. The harvested metadata is annotated during harvesting, for example, with information from gazetteers to resolve geographical locations to place names. This enables users to search for place names, not just geometries.

As a content provider, you need to map your metadata content to the given JSON Schema. We recommend using international vocabularies for your metadata content, such as:

TIP

The list of vocabularies is not fixed and can be easily expanded. However, you should map to existing vocabularies wherever possible to achieve harmonization.

TIP

To become a content provider, please contact us using the 💬 feedback button or email us at o2a-support@awi.de.