ArcGIS Server Geoportal Extension

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See what's new in the ArcGIS Server Geoportal extension at 9.3.1.

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Common Questions

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General

I am a current user of the GIS Portal Toolkit. How do I upgrade to the ArcGIS Server Geoportal extension?

At 9.3, the GIS Portal Toolkit matured to a fully supported extension to ArcGIS Server. It is now called ArcGIS Server Geoportal extension and includes standard maintenance, technical support, and documentation. To learn more about maintenance for and upgrading to the Geoportal extension, please fill out the ArcGIS Server Geoportal Extension Maintenance Information Request Form.

What is the mechanism or procedure for publishing content?

Metadata is the fuel that drives the geoportal. If you don't already have a mechanism where you are maintaining metadata about your geospatial resources, then use the online form in the portal and enter the metadata individually for each resource you want to document.

For a clearinghouse or site with a lot of content, you're probably already creating metadata about your geospatial resources. In that case, you have several options for publishing content:

Upload individual resource metadata documents using the portal Web interface.
Expose your metadata through an ESRI metadata service, Z39.50 catalog, Web-accessible folder, or CS-W catalog so that it can be harvested.
Use the publishing client from ArcCatalog to upload your metadata through a Web-accessible folder, or elect to have your metadata harvested again through either Web-accessible folders, the Z39.50 connector, or a catalog service for the Web connector.

Is the catalog service accessible through a Web service?

The ArcGIS Server Geoportal extension catalog is exposed via CS-W. The catalog is also accessible through a REST API that produces GeoRSS, KML, or HTML responses.

CS-W Clients for ArcGIS

What geospatial resources can I search for and display?

You can search for resources of any type. What you can do with a found resource depends on its type. For example, a WMS service can be added to ArcMap, but a ZIP file containing spatial data will have to be downloaded and extracted before it can be used in ArcMap.

What catalog services can I connect to?

Using the CS-W Client for ArcGIS Desktop or the CS-W Client for ArcGIS Explorer, you can connect to catalog services that support the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), CORE and ebRIM Application Profiles of the OGC CS-W 2.0.1 specification.

How do I connect to a catalog service that implements a different version or a different application profile of the OGC CS-W specification?

The CS-W clients for ArcGIS are designed to support other versions or different application profiles of the OGC CS-W specification. If you have a catalog service that is not yet supported in the CS-W clients, please let us know by sending an e-mail with the service's GetCapabilities URL to portal@esri.com.

Where can I get updates to the CS-W clients for ArcGIS?

Updates to the CS-W clients for ArcGIS will be made available here.

If I have installed both the ArcGIS Desktop and ArcGIS Explorer components of the CS-W clients, do I have to configure my catalog services twice?

No. If you have both components of the CS-W clients installed, they will share the catalog services you have configured.

Publish Client

How does Publish Client work?

The Publish Client traverses the folder you have selected in the ArcCatalog window and attempts to publish any metadata documents with the file extension .xml to the geoportal you specified. The geoportal uses its validation rules to determine whether the metadata should be published or not. The metadata is validated against the rules defined by the metadata standards supported in the geoportal.

How do I review the results of my publish session?

You can find the results of your publish session in two ways:

Look in the publishMetadata.log log file.
Look in the geoportal by clicking the Administration tab.

Search the available metadata records by publication method, where the publication method is set to Batch. The records that passed validation and were published are shown in the table, with a status of Posted and a method of Batch.