The SAON Data Portal is a metadata driven data portal. This implies that data are hosted and served by contributing data centres which expose discovery metadata on the datasets. Once initiated, the SAON Data Portal regularly (once daily) harvests discovery metadata from the contributing data centres and ingests this in the SAON Data Catalogue which is integrated in this site. Provided the data is provided in the appropriate form (encoding) the SAON Data Portal is developing software to transform and combine datasets.
In order to connect your data centre to the SAON Data Portal an OAI-PMH (link is external) or OGC CSW end point serving either GCMD DIF or ISO19115 discovery metadata is required. If ISO19115 is used, discovery metadata should include GCMD Science Keywords to describe the parameters measured. If your data centre is hosting much data and SAON relevant data is mixed between other data, a dedicated OAI-PMH set is welcome to simplify the harvest process for the portal.
Support for other technologies (e.g. OpenSearch, DCAT, Schema.org) are under development.
Depending on the services offered on top of data, by each data centre hosting data, visualisation, subsetting or basket functionality may be available for each dataset listed in the catalogue. This functionality relies as mentioned on the services of the host data centre for the specific dataset. If no services are available, the dataset will link to the landing page for the dataset in the host data centre. Services automatically exploited if appropriately referred in the discovery metadata include currently OPeNDAP and OGC WMS.
Please use the contact form to have your catalogue ingested.