Subportal with no UI

[streino]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The French Ministère de la Transition Écologique (MTE) plans to have data.gouv.fr harvest all its existing catalogs, to make data.gouv.fr and its ecologie.data.gouv.fr subportal the hub for all MTE open and geo data.

In parallel, data.gouv.fr is getting ready to handle INSPIRE HVD data and needs to harvest such data from approximately the same sources (+ some other not related to MTE).

Both MTE and data.gouv.fr are pushing for GeoDCAT-AP, but current Geonetwork DCAT/GeoDCAT expositions are lacking. So we plan to harvest CSW endpoints from data.gouv.fr, until we can confidently transition to DCAT harvesting.

Many existing catalogs handle data for several organizations, and a data.gouv.fr harvester will assign all harvested records to a single organization. We therefore need to create a dedicated harvester for each organization of interest within a catalog.

Describe the solution you'd like

Geonetwork 3 "virtual CSW" feature does exactly what we need.

In Geonetwork 4, creating a "sub portal" automatically creates a UI in addition to the CSW endpoint. Some catalog managers are willing to create CSW endpoints for sub-catalog harvesting, but do not want to expose dedicated UIs. So we'd need a way to disable the UI of a subportal.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Within Geonetwork I don't see alternatives, but maybe I missed an option ?

We could use OGC Filters on the harvester side, but since data.gouv harvesters are usually maintained by the harvested catalogs maintainers, we think it is easier for them to maintain the configuration on the catalog side (along with the rest of their catalog config). This allows for a set-and-forget harvester config on data.gouv side.

We could also block routing of sub-catalog UI routes, but in many cases this would involve different services in the French administration and would therefore significantly increase the complexity of setting up such a solution.