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Metadata Watch Report #2

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 ]

Section 3 - Domain reports

3.1 Audio-visual sector
3.2 Educational sector
3.3 Academic sector
3.4 Geographical information sector
3.5 Publishing sector

3.4 Geographical information sector

1.CURRENT STATE OF DOMAIN

Not much can be added in this report since the last correspondent report made 3 months ago.

The previous list of activities have been extended with 3 very interesting GI metadata activities:

- The GI and GIS Interoperability Project

- The Australian Spatial Data Infrastructure (ASDI)

- Building a 4D Geodynamic Model of Australia

The previous report focued mainly onAmerican and European projects. This time, Australian initiatives are at the center because they are really active in that domain.

The ASDI initiative is interesting because they have a metadata working group who developed guidelines on metadata as well as a metadata entry tool. The guidelines provide details for the recommended metadata elements. This working group can play a key role in centralising or unifying the GI metadata schemas.

"GI and GIS Interoperability Project" of the JRC's Space Application's Institute (SAI), is also essential in the GI metadata field because it is participating is several other GI-related / metadata-related projects, such as ETeMII. In fact, the JRC's GI/GIS Project will probably have a bigger impact in unifying the European GI community around GI standards, including those for metadata, than will separate projects like ETeMII, because the JRC is an actual Directorate General of the EC and has long-term funding available, that is not linked to any specific calls, etc. from FP5.

2.MAIN ISSUES

First, Rick Pearsall, FGDC Metadata Co-ordinator (Federal Geographic Data Committee), sent an announcement on June 9, 2000 to say that the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) Technical Committee 211 (TC211) has just released for review the latest version of the ISO Metadata Standard (19115.3).

Numerous organisations plan to use the ISO Metadata Standard once it has been approved by the ISO Standards Committee. The FGDC is committed to harmonise the CSDGM with the ISO Metadata Standard and has numerous activities ongoing to assure that the harmonisation is successful. To protect the significant already existing metadata investment, it is important to assure that the proposed ISO Metadata Standard allows the maximum compatibility with existing FGDC compliant metadata records.

To establish a FGDC position on the ISO Metadata Standard, the FGDC is conducting a registered review of the ISO Metadata Standard Committee Draft (Version 3).

Anyone interested in helping to establish the FGDC position by reviewing and commenting on the ISO Metadata Standard and/or by helping to adjudicate the comments, the FGDC is interested in hearing from them. The registered review was closed on August 1, 2000.

For more info: http://www.fgdc.gov/metadata/iso_regrvw_v3r.html

Some members of the GI community fear that Dublin Core as a general metadata proposal for digital geospatial data is inadequate. Apparently it would be inadequate for geospatial documentation and does not support catalogue searching better than full-text search in its current form. This is because the Dublin Core elements, or metadata "fields" are general purpose containers into which can be put any text content. Although this is interesting for text fields like the equivalent of title and author, it fails completely on important fields such as Coverage which is meant to contain both temporal and spatial extent.

Furthermore, people use Dublin Core in their own way which is not always interroperable because of a lack of guidance.

This unsatisfaction of some part of the GI community is unfortunate because it will discourage other GI people to use Dublin Core, when it is actually possible to use it together with other metadata schemas creating thus application profiles.

3.TRENDS

The cartographic/mapping agency sectors of the much wider "GI community" are aware of "metadata" - but as Roger Longhorn said, his direct and personal experience of attending conferences and speaking at meetings of sectoral communities who use GI, such as agriculture and coastal zone managers/marine community, is that they are very unaware of metadata or are only now (in 2000!) becoming aware of its importance.

Much of the real value of GI resides in/with these sectors and not in the mapping/cartographic producers of GI! Therefore, their metadata experience is just only beginning.

4.OVERLAPS AND GAPS

The gaps are still the same as identified in the correspondent report 1, that is that there are no real development of metadata for the Web. Too many projects are dealing with metadata catalogues, queries and indexing. Furthermore, projects mainly develop metadata for their own use.

>>Section 3.5 Publishing sector

[ contents | section 1 | section 2 ]

Maintained by: UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN)
Last updated: 07 August 2001