Digital Asia Network

Digital Asia Network is a project to develop a distributed database network establishing the nodes in many region of Asian sub-continent. The objective of this project is to support to conduct research on human security, natural disaster and environmental development in the Asia region.

A similar node has been setup at ICIMOD in November 2006. ICIMOD has been providing digital dataset of Hindu Kush-Himalayan Region that are authorized by the owners of such data to share by Digital Asia Project.

In the process of providing the information into Digital Asia project, ICIMOD has to perform the task like population the metadata system in the Keio server and making digital dataset available to Digital Asia Project through UMN MapSever. The map server and datasets are physically located at ICIMOD, the Digital Asia Browser can access and load them synchronously with other datasets from various nodes.

The metadata data converter was developed in order to change the existing metadata format of ICIMOD to the new format of the project. The main purpose of this converter is to convert the spatial metadata from IKM-MENRIS’s GeoNetwork system to the “Digital Earth Browser” system. The converter reads the file from mySQL system of GeoNetwork and converts to the XML file. The respective thumbnail images are also abstracted from the GeoNetwork system. Later these files (xml and images) are uploaded to the Digital Earth Browser system from their web site.

Click here to view Digital Earth Browser