This repository is a participative effort to collect and maintain a series of descriptions of soil datasets (metadata) in the EU to facilitate discovery of these resources. As a soil scientist or practitioner you are very much invited to contribute to this effort by creating issues or pull requests with improvement suggestions and/or flagging incomplete content.

If a dataset is already described elsewhere (INSPIRE, OpenAire, ...) a reference should be made to the external source, so the metadata can be automatically synchronised. Use the metadata:dataseturi property to capture a reference to the remote document. For now we support either a DOI or a iso19139:2007 document.

The initial format for data submission is CSV, according to a predefined template. Records in the CSV's are converted to MCF, an optimal format for content versioning in GIT. The MCF is later transformed to iso19139 which can be ingested by common catalog products, such as pycsw

This repository is maintained in the scope of the Soilwise HE project.

A CI-CD pipeline synchronises this content with a dedicated gitlab instance at Wageningen university, from which the records are exported to a PostGreSQL database. The configuration of the gitlab repository and database are stored as secrets on the git project.

The initial content of this repository has been collected as part of the EJP Soil project, which has run a number of stock takes of available soil datasets in EU member states.

Dataset descriptions are stored in a format called metadata control file (MCF), which is a subset of ISO19115 encoded as YAML, an optimal encoding for content versioning. An online editor for MCF files is MDME.

At intervals the content of this repository is published is a repository which is searchable through CSW, STAC, OAI-PMH and OGC API Records enpoints.