PANGAEA® Framework for Metadata Portals

panFMP is a generic and flexible framework for building geoscientific metadata portals independent of content standards for metadata and protocols. Data providers can be harvested with commonly used protocols (e.g., Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) and metadata standards like Dublin CoreDIF, or ISO 19115. The new Java-based portal software supports any XML encoding and makes metadata searchable through Apache Lucene. Software administrators are free to define searchable fields independent of their type using XPath and/or XSL Templates. In addition, by extending the full-text search engine (FTS) Apache Lucene, we have significantly improved queries for numerical and date/time ranges by supplying a new trie-based algorithm, thus enabling high-performance space/time retrievals in FTS-based geo portals. The harvested metadata are stored in separate indexes, which makes it possible to combine these into different portals. The portal-specific Java API and web service interface is highly flexible and supports custom front-ends for users, provides automatic query completion (AJAX), and dynamic visualization with conventional mapping tools.

panFMP is maintained at GitHub and uses services supplied by them for tracking bugs, managing source code (Git). Please visit our documentation page for details about installing and using panFMP!

panFMP version 1.1.0 was released on 2014-04-23. You can download the artifacts on the releases page. This version is the last version including the full search server based on Lucene 3.6. If you want to test the latest developments, daily development snapshots are available directly from this homepage. The new version is using Elasticsearch to power the search engine, while panFMP will only provide harvester and mapping of the XML documents.