Content standards for geospatial metadata and their use

*-2mm Among the many GIS standards that provide interoperability of (geo)spatial data and related web services, we can identify a limited but important group of standards, intended to catalog spatial data sets and services. Many of currently used standards are based on international ISO 19115 series and their national profiles. Among them are two Russian national standards developed by the Technical Committee (TC) 394 Geographic information/Geomatics of the Federal Agency on Technical Regulating and Metrology (Rosstandart): the GOST R 57668-2017 “Spatial data. Metadata. Part 1. Fundamentals” and the GOST R 57656-2017 “Spatial data. Metadata. Part 2. Extensions for imagery and gridded data”. The analysis of Russian, foreign and international geoportals with metadata editing, validation and publishing functions has been carried out, including using ISO 19115, FGDC-STD-001-001-1998, DIF, Dublin Core and open source software GeoNode, GeoNetwork, GeoServer, etc. The results of the analysis can be useful in selecting effective spatial metadata management systems in the scientific geoportals.

A Geo-Dashboard Concept for the Interactively Linked Visualization of Provenance and Data Quality for Geospatial Datasets

In Earth System Sciences, a data-driven research domain, several communities discuss the importance, guidance and implementation of making research data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. To foster these principles, in particular to support reusability, users need easy-to-use user interfaces with meaningful visualizations for detailed metainformation, e.g. on dataset’s origin and quality. However, visualization tools to facilitate the evaluation of fitness for use of ESS research data on domainspecific metainformation, do hardly exist.We provide a Geo-dashboard concept for user-friendly interactive and linked visualizations of provenance and quality information using standardized geospatial metadata. A provenance graph visualization serves as overview and entry point for further evaluations. Quality information is essential to evaluate the fitness for use of data. Therefore, we developed quality visualizations on several levels of detail to foster evaluation, e.g. by enabling users to choose and classify quality parameters based on their use-case-specific needs.

Geospatial Metadata for Discovery in Scholarly Publishing

Many scientific articles are related to specific regions of the Earth. The connection is often implicit, although geospatial metadata has been shown to have positive effects, such as detecting biases in research coverage or enhancing discovery of research. Scholarly communication platforms lack an explicit modelling of geospatial metadata. In this work, we report a novel approach to integrate well-defined geospatial metadata into Open Journal Systems (OJS). Authors create complex geometries to represent the related location(s) or region(s) for their submission and define the relevant time period. They are assisted by an interactive map and a gazetteer to capture high quality coordinates as well as a matching textual description with high usability. The geospatial metadata is published within the article pages using semantic tags, integrated in standardised publication metadata, and shown on maps. Thereby, the geoOJS plugin facilitates indexing by search engines, can improve accessibility, and provides a foundation for more powerful map-based discovery of research articles across journals. See the Extended Abstract PDF for more details.

Reducing Consumer Uncertainty: Towards an Ontology for Geospatial User-Centric Metadata

With the increased use of geospatial datasets across heterogeneous user groups and domains, assessing fitness-for-use is emerging as an essential task. Users are presented with an increasing choice of data from various portals, repositories, and clearinghouses. Consequently, comparing the quality and evaluating fitness-for-use of different datasets presents major challenges for spatial data users. While standardization efforts have significantly improved metadata interoperability, the increasing choice of metadata standards and their focus on data production rather than potential data use and application, renders typical metadata documents insufficient for effectively communicating fitness-for-use. Thus, research has focused on the challenge of communicating fitness-for-use of geospatial data, proposing a more “user-centric” approach to geospatial metadata. We present the Geospatial User-Centric Metadata ontology (GUCM) for communicating fitness-for-use of spatial datasets to users in the spatial and other domains, to enable them to make informed data source selection decisions. GUCM enables metadata description for various components of a dataset in the context of different application domains. It captures producer-supplied and user-described metadata in structured format using concepts from domain-independent ontologies. This facilitates interoperability between spatial and nonspatial metadata on open data platforms and provides the means for searching/discovering spatial data based on user-specified quality and fitness-for-use criteria.

Raising Semantics-Awareness in Geospatial Metadata Management

Geospatial metadata are often encoded in formats that either are not aimed at efficient retrieval of resources or are plainly outdated. Particularly, the quantum leap represented by the Semantic Web did not induce so far a consistent, interlinked baseline in the geospatial domain. Datasets, scientific literature related to them, and ultimately the researchers behind these products are only loosely connected; the corresponding metadata intelligible only to humans, duplicated in different systems, seldom consistently. We address these issues by relating metadata items to resources that represent keywords, institutes, researchers, toponyms, and virtually any RDF data structure made available over the Web via SPARQL endpoints. Essentially, our methodology fosters delegated metadata management as the entities referred to in metadata are independent, decentralized data structures with their own life cycle. Our example implementation of delegated metadata envisages: (i) editing via customizable web-based forms (including injection of semantic information); (ii) encoding of records in any XML metadata schema; and (iii) translation into RDF. Among the semantics-aware features that this practice enables, we present a worked-out example focusing on automatic update of metadata descriptions. Our approach, demonstrated in the context of INSPIRE metadata (the ISO 19115/19119 profile eliciting integration of European geospatial resources) is also applicable to a broad range of metadata standards, including non-geospatial ones.