Is Geoportal useful in a Desktop LAN environment?

MattWilkie1

Is Geoportal useful for desktop GIS (ArcMap/Catalog, Pro, Qgis, others) in an environment where all users are in a local area network?

We have about 10 TB of files on local network shares wherein spatial data is intermingled with many other types such as standard office files (doc, xls, pdf, ...). From what I read the discovery mechanisms in Geoportal would be useful, but we definitely do NOT want people doing zip-clip-ship of the interesting things they find. They should be accessing the files directly though UNC paths or mapped drives.

Marten

hi, Geoportal Server itself is a web application, but can be run behind firewalls with proper configuration. In your case what you could do is setup an internal Java web server (like Apache Tomcat) and then deploy Geoportal Server there. There are two applications to consider: one is the catalog, the other is the harvester. The catalog is what you users would use when searching for content. The harvester is what would populate the catalog in an automated way.

You can see a sample Geoportal Server Catalog app here at https://gptogc.esri.com/geoportal2/

The harvester can collect metadata from many sources, including UNC paths and even a table in a RDBMS.

Geoportal Server is open source. You can find code and builds on GitHub:

• Catalog - https://github.com/Esri/geoportal-server-catalog 
• Harvester - https://github.com/Esri/geoportal-server-harvester