Metadata education suggestions and materials for:
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Learning Material | Preparatory topics | Complementary topics | Vocabulary
Motivation
Knowledge
"Many organizations and data users have developed and promoted standards for spatial data collection and representation. Good summaries are found in GETF (1996) and NAPA (1998). In the United States, the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) oversees the development of a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). The UCGIS research community endorses the significant strides made by FGDC to establish and implement standards on data content, accuracy, and transfer. FGDC's goal is to provide a consistent means to directly compare the content and positional accuracy of spatial data obtained by different methods for the same point and thereby facilitate interoperability of spatial data. Similarly, the Open GIS Consortium is working with public, industry, and non-profit producers and consumers of GIS technology and geospatial data to develop international standards for interoperability (GETF, 1996)."
Standards - whether they are for data collection, data transfer, documentation (metadata), or for software, are all designed to facilitate the dissemination, communication, and use of information by multiple producers and users. The Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS) for transfering spatial data is described as "of significant interest to users and producers of digital spatial data because of the potential for increased access to and sharing of spatial data, the reduction of information loss in data exchange, the elimination of the duplication of data acquisition, and the increase in the quality and integrity of spatial data". Though the SDTS is a standard for data transfer, not metadata, it is closely related to metadata in the fact that it "embraces the philosophy of self-contained transfers, i.e. spatial data, attribute, georeferencing, data quality report, data dictionary, and other supporting metadata all included in the transfer."
In fact, almost all standards either rely on or incorporate metadata in order to accomplish their purpose. A major portion of the UCGIS research initiative on interoperability discusses the importance of metadata: "Metadata comprise a key component for any interoperability scheme. Metadata have received attention but are generally viewed as headers on the data. As the format of metadata evolves towards a machine readable form, improved reliability and consistency in the interchange of geographic information will occur."
For instance, in order for different software systems to be interoperable, they must be able to automatically read standardized metadata about each other's structure and organization in order to communicate and interact. Here is an example of research on automated metadata interpretation, presented at the International Conference on Interoperating Geographic Information Systems Santa Barbara, CA (December 1997) by Brandon Plewe.
Recent trends in education are also highlighting the importance of metadata, as the vast amount of educational material on the Web needs to be catalogued and organized in a standardized way so that it can be utilized interoperably for different educational environments. (see the IMS Global Learning Consortium web pages at imsproject.org for more details).
The future of GIS, similar to many other information technologies, is moving towards an international, distributed, interoperable environment: for education,business, industry, resource management and public interests. Standards, with metadata as an important ingredient, will play an increasingly important role in the development of the Global Information Infrastructure, as well as providing a platform for new technological advances (National Committee for Information Technology Standards). The Open GIS Consortium contributed an excellent article to GIS World (1995) on the importance of information technology standards in relation to the impact of rapidly changing information technologies on organizations and society as a whole. A recent press announcement (Feb. 2000) by the Open GIS Consortium also highlights the importance of standards as well as the underlying but critical role of metadata in implementing this new realm in information technology.
There are many benefits (and some complications) associated with standards. For more information, see the topic on Overview of the metadata content standard. Though this section refers to metadata standard in particular, metadata standards share many similar benefits and issues with other types of GIS data and software standards.
Advanced material:
Cross-Media Database Normalization Across Various Metadata Standards
Lesch, J. 2001. Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual ESRI User Conference.
View paper
NAPA, 1998, Geographic Information for the 21st Century: Building a Strategy for the Nation, Washington: National Academy of Public Administration, 358 p.