Relations

Introduction

This chapter describes general services used to get and set relations between metadata records inside GeoNetwork. The association is performed by a Relations table which stores a metadata id and a metadata relatedId fields.

Structure of table Relations:

Field Datatype Description
id foreign key to Metadata(id) Source metadata whose relation is being described.
relatedId foreign key to Metadata(id) Metadata related to the source one

xml.relation.get

This service retrieves all relations between metadata.

Request

The request accepts an id and a relation parameters, whose meaning is this:

  • id (integer): This is the local GeoNetwork identifier of the metadata whose relations are requested.
  • relation (string, ’normal’): This optional parameter identifies the kind of relation that the client wants to be returned. It can be one of these values:
    • normal: The service performs a query into the id field and returns all relatedId records.
    • reverse: The service performs a query into the relatedId field and returns all id records.
    • full: Includes both normal and reverse queries (duplicated ids are removed).

Here is an example of POST/XML request:

<request>
    <id>10</id>
    <relation>full</relation>
</request>

Response

The response has a response root element with several metadata children depending on the relations found. Example:

<response>
    <metadata>...</metadata>
    <metadata>...</metadata>
    ...
</response>

Each metadata element has the following structure:

  • title: Metadata title
  • abstract: A brief explanation of the metadata
  • keyword: Keywords found inside the metadata
  • image: Information about thumbnails
  • link: A link to the source site
  • geoBox: coordinates of the bounding box
  • geonet:info: A container for GeoNetwork related information

Example of a metadata record:

<metadata>
    <title>Globally threatened species of the world</title>
    <abstract> Contains information on animals.</abstract>
    <keyword>biodiversity</keyword>
    <keyword>endangered animal species</keyword>
    <keyword>endangered plant species</keyword>
    <link type="url">http://www.mysite.org</link>
    <geoBox>
        <westBL>-180.0</westBL>
        <eastBL>180.0</eastBL>
        <southBL>-90.0</southBL>
        <northBL>90.0</northBL>
    </geoBox>
    <geonet:info>
        <id>11</id>
        <schema>fgdc-std</schema>
        <createDate>2005-03-31T19:13:31</createDate>
        <changeDate>2007-03-12T14:52:46</changeDate>
        <isTemplate>n</isTemplate>
        <title/>
        <source>38b75c1b-634b-443e-9c36-a12e89b4c866</source>
        <UUID>84b4190b-de43-4bd7-b25f-6ed47eb239ac</uuid>
        <isHarvested>n</isHarvested>
        <view>true</view>
        <admin>false</admin>
        <edit>false</edit>
        <notify>false</notify>
        <download>true</download>
        <dynamic>false</dynamic>
        <featured>false</featured>
    </geonet:info>
</metadata>