Metadata

The rapid growth of the internet as a means of searching for, disseminating and receiving data has given rise to a corresponding increase in interest in metadata. As a result of this there has been a considerable amount of effort put into developing metadata standards which, for spatial data, has resulted in the recent ratification of ISO19115. Many organisations in the geoscience community are working to implement this and related standards, but often as separate and uncoordinated activities.

Although the CGI does not have any formal working group concerned with geoscience metadata it was felt that it could help geoscience organisations develop their metadata implementations by providing a forum for posting work and discussions. Hopefully this will enable organisations to learn from one another and thus save development time.

The ISO19115 standard recognises that different organisations or user communities may wish to specify their own implementations of the standard, for example by making specific restrictions on the values that can be entered to particular fields or adding extensions to meet their specific needs. These can be defined, and registered, as ISO community profiles. There may be advantages in developing such a profile for the geoscience community, and if so this forum could be the first step in this direction. If there is sufficient interest from the community in developing a geoscience profile then a formal CGI working group might be needed.

Follow the links below to the discussion board and document list:

• Discussion Board
• Documents