Esri Geoportal Extension to Become Open Source

The Geoportal Extension will be released under one of the variants of the Creative Commons open source license and will include elements like:
• Geoportal Web application
• OGC CSW 2.0.2 catalog service with OGCCORE and ISO Application Profile support
• INSPIRE compliant discovery service
• Extensible FGDC, ISO, DC metadata support
• Configurable search engine including spatial ranking algorithm
• Federated searches to standards-based (CS-W), Web 2.0 (OpenSearch), or other types of search providers (CMS, Document Management Systems, ...)
• CSW clients (.NET + Java)
• Data Discovery Widget for Flex
• Data Discovery Widget for Silverlight
• Data Discovery Widget for HTML
• Ontology Service (java webapp)
• WMC clients (.NET)
• Publishing client (.NET)

Seven years ago Esri created what was then called the GIS Portal Toolkit as a software and services solution, based on code from a number of earlier projects and prototypes for data discovery and map viewing. Since starting with GIS Portal Toolkit, those using it to create geoportals and clearinghouses have had access to its source code. Understandably, as people looked at creating websites that reflected the organisation's identity.

At version 9.3 this resulted in Geoportal becoming a fully supported extension with a full maintenance program. We put a lot of effort in making Geoportal Extension configurable to a large extent with respect to authentication, metadata profile support, the index used for discovery, localisation, skin development, and more.

The code will be available by the end of September 2010 and the team is looking forward to working with a larger community to further develop this product.