We proudly announce that the new application ServiceCube is officially available under an open source license. ServiceCube is the new name for the software formerly known as CatMDServices.
It is an initiative of the National Geographic Institute of Spain (IGN), which is the result of the scientific and technical collaboration between IGN and the Advanced Information Systems Group (IAAA) of the University of Zaragoza with the technical support of GeoSpatiumLab (GSL).
ServiceCube is a Web application for describing and searching web services by means of metadata. The tool has been implemented with J2EE and GWT technology and has the following features:
- Multi-platform (Windows, Unix). As it has been developed with J2EE and the storage of metadata records is managed directly through the file system, the application can be deployed in any platform with the requirements of having installed Tomcat and a Java virtual machine. On the client side users only need a web browser with Javascript support.
- Multilingual. The application has been developed following the Java internationalization methodology. Nowadays, there is support for Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician and the Basque language. With little effort, other languages can be supported.
-Description of services by means of metadata in compliance with the metadata implementing rules of the INSPIRE directive. The metadata model proposed follows the guidelines for mapping the metadata implementing rules to ISO 19115/19119.
- Web services searching of metadata stored in the local metadata repository according to different criteria such as the geographic extension of the data provided by the service, the keywords, the service type or the services provider.
- Automatic metadata generation from the “getCapabilities” operation supported by a service that complies with the OGC Specifications (WMS, CSW, WFS, WCS or WPS).
- Thesaurus and controlled list utilities to facilitate the edition of metadata. This enables metadata creators to use them in order to fill in some metadata elements. The use of controlled keywords facilitates the mapping between a selected vocabulary and a large collection of records.
- On-line help.
ServiceCube can be downloaded from Sourceforge at the following web site:
http://spatiumcube.sourceforge.net/components.html