[Geowanking] Better auto-discovery in the Geo-Web through "see” and “see also" links?

[Stefan Keller]

How about getting better auto-discovery in the Geo-Web?
How about more special search engines for geospatial webservices?

Approach: Step 1. a focussed crawler is referred to a webservice given
a (root) geo-website (“see” link) and step 2. the referrer and/or the
geo-webservice indicates one or more "friends" ("see also" link, [2]).
In other words, a porter points to the webservices - which is like a
finding needle in the haystack - and he and the found needles point
you to other needles!

These are the proposals I've collected so far:

1. extending robots.txt (see [1])
2. extending links/META tags in HTML ([1])
3. extending (geo-)sitemaps (www.sitemaps.org), and
4. extending GetCapabilities

What do you think?

Regards, S.

P.S. I favor 1,2 and 4. And I know I rather should ask geo-metadata
specialists (which I'll do) - but I think this is the right place to
start with.

[1] http://www.openarchives.org/pipermail/oai-implementers/2006-November/001656.html
.
[2] http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-friends.htm .