In our company we have a "geoportal" that consists more or less of a list with links to where the datafiles are on our server and some complementary information about the data. The data is described in detail in pdf-files and there's no possibility to search. Now we're thinking about updating to the Geoportal-Extension, particularly as we want to offer the user the possibility to search for data.
As we don't have a lot of resources to set up the geoportal and later to maintain it, we don't want to write a lot of metadata (and later to keep it up to date), but go on using those pdf-Files as the main source of information about the data and write as little metadata as possible.
I spent quite some time reading in the Geoportal-Help and elsewhere in the web and here's what I figured out:
I think we can't avoid writing some metadate for our data in a standardized way, so that we can load it in the geoportal. As a part of the metadata, there would be a link to the pdf-file with the description and if the user searches for something, the pdf file would be searched as well. BUT is the search enging of the geoportal able to search in pdf-files? If not, is it possible, to install a second search engine just for the pdf's? (obviously they do exist >> http://www.searchtools.com/info/pdf.html)
Would this be possible to realize? Or how else could I include those pdf-files in the geoportal?
