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Introduction to geoportals

What is a geoportal

A geoportal is a gateway to web-based geospatial resources, enabling you to discover, view, and access geospatial information and services made available by their providing organizations. Likewise, data providers can use the geoportal to make their geospatial resources discoverable, viewable, and accessible to others.

Esri Geoportal Server provides seamless communication with data services that use a wide range of communication protocols, and also supports searching, publishing, and managing standards-based resources.

What is the Esri Geoportal Server

Esri Geoportal Server provides seamless communication with data services that use a wide range of communication protocols. It also supports searching, publishing, and managing standards-based metadata. Geoportal Server allows an organization to build a custom geoportal that meets INSPIRE Classic style, resource needs, and use objectives.

The INSPIRE Classic Geoportal Server system requirements are different from other software components of INSPIRE Classic. See the installation and system requirements as well as the documentation for important information about Esri Geoportal Server.

The suite of software modules includes the following:

  • A customizable Geoportal Server web app for publishing, administering, and searching resources
  • A map interface for viewing live data resources
  • Integration with content management systems (CMS) to organize resources to support focused user communities
  • A separate Harvester component for harvesting a wide variety of metadata formats and protocols from many difference sources; search results are exposed through the REST API so resources can be easily shared among applications and users
  • Widgets for searching geoportals from an HTML page with interactive maps

Esri Geoportal Server is maintained separately as a free and open source product on GitHub. The system requirements are different from other software components of ArcGIS for INSPIRE Classic. Refer to the Esri Geoportal Server GitHub page for detailed system requirements and installation instructions for Geoportal Server Catalog and Geoportal Server Harvester.