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.

Metadata Posted Document List

The following documents concerned with geoscience metadata have been submitted. To post a document please contact us. (Unfortunately for security reasons we are not able to allow direct posting of documents to the web site.)

All documents are in PDF format. The name of the contributor and the date the document was posted appear in brackets.

• Explanations of the metadata elements implemented by BGS (John Laxton, 28/01/2005)
• An Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) showing the BGS implementation of the ISO19115 core metadata (John Laxton, 29/06/2004)
• Documentation describing the BGS Oracle implementation of the ISO19115 core metadata (John Laxton, 29/06/2004)
• Naming conventions used in the BGS implementation of the ISO19115 core metadata (John Laxton, 29/06/2004)
• Conventions used in the ERD diagrams (John Laxton, 29/06/2004)
• An ERD showing the full BGS metadata implementation, including those non-core ISO19115 elements used, and extensions (John Laxton, 29/06/2004)
• A spreadsheet showing the ISO19115 elements implemented by BGS and their relationship with legacy BGS metadata (John Laxton, 29/06/2004)
• The Business Rules used by BGS in implementing ISO19115 (John Laxton, 04/10/2004)