Monday October 20 2025 marked the start of an intense 3-day code sprint at the VONK innovation center in Rotterdam, organized by the OGC and Geonovum.
GeoCat was pleased to join this sprint with 3 team members (2 on-site and 1 remotely), contributing to both OGC API - Records and OGC API - Joins implementations.
OGC API - Records and GeoNetwork 5
The GeoCat team showcased their progress on the GeoNetwork 5 OGC API - Records implementation. This work represents one of the first implementations to support both OGC API - Records Part 1 and the draft of Part 2.
Throughout the sprint, the team took part in several group discussions and carried out initial tests using metadata schemas beyond the included set. Their work built on the setup demonstrated during the event's mentor stream: a workshop where participants had the opportunity to create a local environment featuring the latest GeoNetwork 5 developments.
During the “Content Negotiation by Profile” discussion, participants highlighted the need to identify one of the available output formats as the native format. This is an aspect not currently covered by the specification. This point was included among the sprint’s key discussion items and will be further explored on the specification's GitHub repository. Knowing the original format of a metadata record is important for several functionalities, such as data editing and harvesting.
In the "OGC API - Records ad hoc on Transactions & Harvesting" discussion group, where Part 3 of the specification was being discussed, several ideas on the harvesting process were shared. It was an opportunity to compare GeoNetwork's approach to metadata management, process workflow, and editing in organizations with larger process-driven metadata management needs. The insights gained from the various discussions were useful in refining GeoNetwork 5's new modular architecture and configuration, which was further developed during the code sprint.
OGC API - Joins and pygeoapi
Geonovum funded the development of an OGC API - Joins implementation for pygeoapi. GeoCat was happy to participate and successfully managed to build a minimal implementation from scratch. In fact, this was the first implementation for a popular server application.
Because the specification is still in draft, it proved extremely helpful that Pekka Latvala, the author of the spec, was also present at the event. While coding on the implementation, new ideas and suggestions popped up, which were submitted as issues in the specification's GitHub repository. The changes or improvements can be incorporated into the final version of the OGC API - Joins spec, which will become available in 2026.
On the final day of the event, a rough first versions of the OGC API - Joins pygeoapi implementation was demonstrated to the audience. In the coming weeks, GeoCat will polish this implementation and distribute a working example on the Geonovum API Testbed environment for others to try out.
Photo by Theo Felten