Metadata Access Methods
There is a broad spectrum of access options to the IMDI based metadata descriptions describing and bundling the resources:
- Browsing in the domain of linked IMDI descriptions. To be able to do this you first have to download and install the IMDI Browser. This browser allows you to also browse in local or combined IMDI domains. (short guide; for details we refer the manual. To install the browser you need to have java installed)
- Browsing with normal Web-Browsers in the IMDI domain. (short guide, start web-browser)
- Carry out structured and unstructured searches using the
two browsers. Unstructured search offers a Google like simplicity, but
will in general also lead to many more hits. (update short guide, manual, start browser (uses java webstart))
- Use the IMDI Browser to create a local copy of an IMDI subtree. (create short guide, manual)
- Use search engines such
as Google. However, to reduce the number of hits from other sources,
you have to focus the search by adding more search information such as,
to
search for "IMDI Tofa" which will result in the root node of this
language. (start google)
- Geographic browsing with the help of GoogleEarth. However, first you have to download the GoogleEarth client software, and then you can download the actual DOBES or MPI "kmz" files that include the metadata information and the coordinates. (short guide is available, start GoogleEarth with DOBES overlay)
- You can also use Dublin Core based search engines to search in the IMDI domain. Please go to the appropriate search page (We should note that at this very moment the OLAC harvester does not harvest IMDI metadata due to the amount of data delivered. We hope that this will change soon)