New releases after the GeoBlacklight Community Summer 2021 Sprint
The GeoBlacklight Community completed another Summer Sprint, held from August 30 to September 3, 2021.
The overarching goal of this sprint was to develop a Version 4 release to support the Aardvark Metadata Profile. We ended up settling on a pre-release to indicate that more testing and enhancements still need to be done. However, we did address several maintenance issues and updated the current release to version 3.4.
Other activities included updating the project website, assessing existing metadata tools, and improving the application's fixture (sample) metadata records.
The sprint was divided into 3 overlapping tracks.
1. Usability
The Usability team focused on how to integrate Aardvark metadata into GeoBlacklight's default user interface. Activities: - added new metadata fields to the item view page and search page facets - created a mockup showing how to display the new item relationships available with the new Aardvark fields - updated the default order of the search facets to reflect the user studies reported in two journal articles: - Mapping Search Queries to Metadata Fields in a GeoBlacklight Repository - Usability Analysis of the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal: Findings and Recommendations for Improvement of the User Experience - determined the rules and configuration options for icon display
2. Application Development (Software maintenance & coding)
The Application Development team focused on fixing deprecation warnings and incorporating the changes specified by the Usability track group.
Current release: Version 3.4.0
This minor release includes maintenance issues and a few enhancements: - addressed numerous deprecation warnings inherited from the Blacklight software that will enable us to use Blacklight's Version 8 (still in development) in the future. - fixed a homepage map bug - updated the default interface with improved search result sorting options
New search results sort options
Pre-release: Version 4.0.0-alpha
This major pre-release includes several global changes: - fully incorporates the latest Aardvark metadata profile - features new facet names and ordering - includes multiple item relation widgets
3. Documentation (Metadata, website, and migration guides)
The Documentation team made assessments of existing metadata documentation and began the process of migrating the content to a new GitHub pages site in the OpenGeoMetadata organization. The latest documentation can be found here: https://opengeometadata.org
More documentation work is on the way in the form of workflow recommendations for converting metadata from the GeoBlacklight 1.0 schema to the newer Aardvark profile.
For more details, view our running notes from the daily standups, as well as the GitHub projects boards here and here.