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WEBDAV Harvesting

This harvesting type uses the WebDAV (Distributed Authoring and Versioning) protocol or the WAF (web accessible folder) protocol to harvest metadata from a web server. It can be useful to users that want to publish their metadata through a web server that offers a DAV interface. The protocol permits retrieval of the contents of a web page (a list of files) along with the change date.

Adding a WebDAV harvester

figure Adding a WebDAV harvester

  • Site - Options about the remote site.

    • Subtype - Select WebDAV or WAF according to the type of server being harvested.
    • Name - This is a short description of the remote site. It will be shown in the harvesting main page as the name for this instance of the WebDAV harvester.
    • URL - The remote URL from which metadata will be harvested. Each file found that ends with .xml is assumed to be a metadata record.
    • Icon - An icon to assign to harvested metadata. The icon will be used when showing search results.
    • Use account - Account credentials for basic HTTP authentication on the WebDAV/WAF server.

  • Options - Scheduling options.

    • Run at - The time when the harvester will run.
    • Will run again every - Choose an interval from the drop down list and then select the days for which this scheduling will take place.
    • One run only - Checking this box will cause the harvester to run only when manually started using the Run button on the Harvesting Management page.

  • Options - Specific harvesting options for this harvester.

    • Validate - If checked, the metadata will be validated after retrieval. If the validation does not pass, the metadata will be skipped.
    • Recurse - When the harvesting engine will find folders, it will recursively descend into them.

  • Privileges - Assign privileges to harvested metadata.

    • Groups - Groups can be selected from the scrolling list. When the Add button is pushed, a row of privileges will be created below the scrolling list for each group. Privileges can then be checked/unchecked for each group as required.
    • Remove - To remove a row click on the Remove button on the right of the row.

  • Categories

    • Select one or more categories from the scrolling list. The harvested metadata will be assigned to the selected categories.

Notes

  • The same metadata could be harvested several times by different instances of the WebDAV harvester. This is not good practise because copies of the same metadata record will have a different UUID.
  • in order to be successfully harvested, metadata records retrieved from the remote site must match a metadata schema in the local GeoNetwork instance