ASDD geospatial metadata management

Overview

Structured data with valid content enables the consistent description of datasets. This forms the basis for searching, presenting various interpretations of the metadata, automatically building interfaces directly from the content, and transforming the metadata to meet other standards. Store once, view many.

Document management solutions need to make it easy for the custodian to describe their data, while at the same time enforcing a consistent structure behind the scenes. Capable and readily available document management facilities, combined with clever data discovery tools that realise the benefits of metadata, will encourage the description of datasets.

Criteria

• store and manage metadata in accordance with relevant standards and guidelines
  • ANZMETA XML Document Type Definition (DTD) for geospatial metadata
  • ANZLIC Metadata Guidelines "Core Metadata Elements for Land and Geographic Directories in Australia and New Zealand"
• able to produce output (as documents or dynamic data) with different views of the metadata

Capabilities

Any metadata management option would require the following capabilities and needs to address the ASDD Requirements and Standards.

• Type of software
  • Network service (Internet or Intranet), or stand alone.
• Store structured metadata
  • reliably hold the metadata in a database or document repository
  • according to the rules of the ANZMETA XML DTD
• Enter metadata
  • interfaces and other means to load to the repository
• Edit metadata
  • facilities to retrieve from the repository and save changes
• Registered user and metadata custodian
  • only the registered owner of a dataset description can make changes
  • enforced by the document management system (not necessarily by an authority)
• Well-formed XML output
  • be able to pass the well-formed test of an XML parser
• Structural validation of XML
  • according to the rules of the ANZMETA XML DTD
  • be able to pass through an XML validating parser
• Content checking
  • according to the ANZLIC Metadata Guidelines
  • keywords must match the Controlled Vocabularies
• Generate presentation documents
  • produce various output documents for presentation and transfer
  • HTML, XML, SUTRS (Simple Unstructured Text Record Syntax)

XML Validation

The importance of ensuring that xml metadata records are valid xml (i.e. conform to ANZMETA) cannot be over-emphasised.

Various options are available. Some of them also conduct content verification as well as xml validation.

• Local metadata validation using an xml parser such as xmllint (note that you will need to configure the DTD catalog).
• Validate your XML documents tool at Geoscience Australia.
• ANZMP metadata parser at IndexGeo Pty Ltd