GoGeo: New look, new search architecture

GoGeo’s home page now sports dynamic panels that surface much useful content.

GoGeo now sports an interface improved in usability, functionality and visual design.

A new look GoGeo went live at the end of May, updating the previous design from 2007. Jackie Clark, EDINA web designer, explains some of the principles behind her new design:

“We’ve moved away from a ‘newspaper’ style interface, with much information and links to browse on the homepage, to a more ‘compact’ design which is hopefully less daunting for the user to digest.”

Other key aims of this new design are the incorporation of live feeds from other content-generating resources, including the GoGeo Twitter account and a live feed of the newest datasets added into the ShareGeo Open data repository.

Dynamic panels, where the content is controlled by the user hovering their mouse, enable the surfacing of much useful content on the home page, such as those related to metadata, which previously were far down the page and infrequently visited. As greater importance is placed on metadata, e.g. from the INSPIRE regulations, it is expected such content will be used more often.

Metadata searches are also powered by a new technical architecture: the GeoNetwork open source catalogue application now drives the metadata searching, enabling GoGeo to harvest metadata records from catalogues supporting the Catalog Services for the Web specification as well as OAI-PMH and z39.50 targets. This allows GoGeo to harvest new catalogues being made available in response to INSPIRE, therefore enabling the discovery of even more geospatial data.

On a final note, GoGeo has also dropped the unusual punctuation (Go-Geo!) that has foxed many a spell-checker over the years.

For a more detailed review of the improvements to GoGeo, please read the post in the GoGeo Blog. If you have any comments about the new look GoGeo, please drop the team a note through the Contact Us form.

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