On Thu, 17 Jun 2004, SCISOFT wrote: > Is there a standard metadata schema and format other than the seemingly ad > hoc stuff that MapInfo supports? I mean all that \\ stuff
The US standard for GIS metadata is referenced at http://www.fgdc.gov/metadata/metadata.html. There's a lot to it, but I believe there's also a minimum spec. > It would seem to be the ideal target for some good XML utility. I know I had > a look at Lars' small venture into XML for (as I recall) metadata, but I > found that the XML produced did not pass XML Spy's testing. It's ideally suited to XML structuring. I would be surprised if no one has already started to tackle that problem. Might be worth a little Google research before jumping into work on it. > That's a small problem, the larger one is an accepted metadata schema - imho > the ANZLIC (Australian) metadata schema is so lengthy and cumbersome that I > would be deterred if I had to fill in all that stuff for every table, > keystroke by keystroke. There are utilities for generating standard ANZLIC > metadata where a project manager or agency sets up a lot of defaults. They > had an Access application that did that, and I believe that Encom's Discover > pushes metadata into Access storage. I'm not sure it's 2-way though: it > would seem much easier to do data-intensive stuff within Access and push it > back to Mapinfo's swathe of loose files (it's the TAB that has the metadata, > I believe) in a single operation (MapBasic). If you're working with Australian data, use the Australian standard. It will be a while before the world agrees on a common standard for anything. You can extract a lot of information automatically from the tables, but some metadata you're just going to have to type in yourself (or copy from the data source's metadata.) The US standard has the same problem -- lots of categories to fill in and some of them require indexing and catalogging skill more likely to be held by trained librarians rather than the average GIS developer. The point is that you should also consider how metadata is going to be used. MapInfo never followed the FGDC standard nor developed tools to use it to search data tables, so the work they did on it has been sort of wasted I think. - Bill Thoen --------------------------------------------------------------------- List hosting provided by Directions Magazine | www.directionsmag.com | To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message number: 12257
