Userfeedback proposal

Date	2017-05-15	Contacts	Jose García, Paul van Genuchten
Status	To do	Release	3.4.0
Resources		Ticket #
Source code
Funding	Elise tools (ISA2/JRC)

Overview

The W3C working group Data on the Web Best Practices recently included 2 best practices related to gathering and publishing of user feedback when publishing data on the web. In the spatial domain the FP7 GeoViqua project has raised this topic before, the latter work is now adopted by OGC in the Geospatial User Feedback working group.

User feedback provides ways to improve metadata and data quality. Publishing the collected user feedback in the context (metadata) of the dataset provides value to potential users. User feedback can contain hints how to best use the data and gives an indication of the relevance of a dataset.

We're proposing to implement a user feedback system inside the Geonetwork opensource project (or actually improve the exisisting system).

This work is executed in the scope of the EU’s ISA2 Programme, The EC Joint Research Centre is leading the new ELISE Action, addressing several interoperability issues related to geospatial data and services. Building on Geonovum’s Geo4Web testbed in 2016, ELISE has launched new activities to improve the discoverability, accessibility and usability of INSPIRE services.

Technical Details:

3 parts of GeoNetwork will be updated

The UI will be updated to show for every metadata recent user feedback and the option to add new user feedback

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We suggest to create new api-methods to retrieve and create user feedback. The api will be designed in such a way that it will be quite easy to override the storage mechanism to a custom storage backend. Foreseen storage backends are:

The catalog itself (using the GUF schema, see below)
A database table
An external forum/issue system (new issues will be created in the external system, tagged with the metadata-uri) The api will also manage to send email to the metadata owner in case new feedback is created.

For storage a schema-profile using the GUF schema will be introduced. The GUF schema is advertised here http://schemas.opengis.net/guf/1.0/. We will focus on idexing and linking to metadata, since visualisation and edits using the gn-editor are not in the scope of this proposal. Would be interesting to provide mappings to https://schema.org/Rating and duv as part of the html and rdf output formats.

The admin > settings page will have a setting which facilitates to replace the current "rating stars" with this user feedback mechanism.

The amount of (positive) user-feedback provided for a metadata should increase its relevance in the search index