To provide compliance with the INSPIRE European directive, the Instituto Geográfico Português (IGP) developed SNIG, the National Geographic Information System platform.

"Trusting MIG development to Xpand IT resulted in a very good and feature rich editor. Development cycles were accurate and everything went without a hassle."By Henrique Silva, MIG Project Manager

The SNIG platform makes all Portuguese geographic data and metadata available online, providing powerful search and reference mechanisms that were previously impossible to obtain, mostly due to the diversity of existing formats and the decentralized nature of Portuguese geographic data. This platform represents a major step stone for combining state-of-the-art technologies with national geographic information management, making it easy to edit and view online and offline geographic data.

INDUSTRY • Govermment KEY BENEFITS • Easy metadata manipulation • Intuitive streamlined Interface • Platform Independent • XSLT 2.0 Support • Opensource Technologies • Implements a subset for the 19115, 19119 &19139 ISO formats XPAND IT SERVICES & SOLUTIONS • XPS - Xpand IT Professional Services

The Problem

The first version of the MIG editor, developed in-house during 2006 using Microsoft’s .Net technology, presented several limitations:

• Difficult to use interface • OS dependent (Microsoft Windows) • Closed source • Difficult to extend architecture • Unable to edit multiple records

• No auto-update mechanism • Unable to edit Service Records • Not compliant with the new MIG profile • No preview mode available

 

The old MIG editor presented too many limitations to ensure effective and incremental development cycles. It was not open sourced, so community development was simply not possible. Also, the old version was not compliant with the new MIG profile and its user interface had several flaws that sometimes rendered it unstable and difficult to use. A new, open source and fresh approach was clearly needed to make the new version appealing not only to users, but also to developers that might be interested in extending the product. This new approach presented some technical challenges regarding multi-record editing, XSLT 2.0 transformation support, tree navigation hierarchy, auto-update capabilities and meaningful error detection in opened records.

The Challenge

When planning the initial steps for MIG development, we had crucial issues to solve in order to make the new version not only a major improvement over the first one but also a symbol of Xpand’s product and service excellence.

The new solution had to be based only in open source libraries and/or frameworks and, most of all, had to be easy and intuitive to use and update. Since the main use of this application is for collecting geographic metadata, possibly on the field, the new interface ought to be consistent and also a pleasure to use, presenting a coherent way to do each task (even the most tedious ones!), featuring human readable icons and friendly toolbars while always providing high responsiveness to user requests.

The Solution

The main challenge was to implement an improved geographic metadata editor compliant with the 19115 and 19119 iso standards. The new MIG editor was entirely developed using Java 6 technology, relying on the Swing toolkit for presentation components. This made multiple operating system integration possible, so each user can edit their metadata in virtually any java virtual machine implementation such as Windows, Linux or even Mac OS X!

MIG Editor 2 features a fine tuned interface for easy navigation among records and their respective sections, a contact manager and three view modes: forms, XSLT transformations and raw xml for maximum control over the generated xml file.

Whether the user needs to check all the hardcore xml details of a record or perhaps just a prettified simple view resulting from a XSLT transformation, MIG editor 2 makes all this possible with just a single click. It even remembers every component state, view and currently opened records so the user can resume its work across separate runs of the editor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Being an open source product, MIG editor 2 binaries and source code are hosted in sourceforge.net. Be sure to check out http://sourceforge.net/projects/migeditor for further information on this project and the community behind it.

 

Standards & Technologies

The MIG Editor is a geographical metadata editor that implements a subset of the 19115, 19119 and 19139 ISO formats, based in the Portuguese Metadata Profile and INSPIRE requirements. It relies solely on the following open source technologies:

• Java 6
• Swing
• TikeSwing framework
• IzPack installer library
• Saxon XSLT library

 

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