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Geospatial Data and Metadata Requirements
posted by Satri
on Tuesday August 01, @07:28AM
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from the building-up-a-mountain dept.
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Access to geospatial data and metadata is amongst the great challenges of our discipline. The geowanking list lead me to the OSGeo Geodata Metadata Requirements wiki page, which as close ties with their Public Geospatial Data Project. If they succeed in their mission, which includes "Run a repository of open geodata", it may have numerous significant positive impacts. See related stories below (this PGDP project was featured on slashgeo last March).
Related Stories
Application Domains: New Metadata Layout Method? 8 comments
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belg4mit writes "As a part of my thesis (PDF) looking at Green Maps I noticed that they lacked a clean means of conveying details—or metadata—about the displayed features. For my own maps I then ended up developing what seems to be a unique solution (PDF); it works especially well when you can print the map and details on opposite sides of a sheet to flip back and forth. I've not seen the likes of this or other elegant solutions anywhere else, probably because most common map forms do not need to convey as much information about so many point features. Is anyone familiar with prior art? Any comments? I've received a fair amount of positive feedback from initial review by end users."
Must Spatial Data Infracstructures Fail?
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Paul Ramsey discuss the state and challenges of geospatial data with spatial data infrastructures (SDI). From the entry's introduction: "Good news about the larger SDI vision is hard to come by. The larger vision includes a central catalogue, clients that search the catalogue, find services, and then consume the services. Portions of the vision are still "in progress" from a technological point of view -- standardized searching of catalogues for services is still a topic of discussion, not a fully settled issue, so it will be a while before the problem can be delegated to the political realm of getting folks on board. [...] A GeoNapster could dramatically improve data sharing, by making the process very very very easy." About this last quote, see the OSGeo Public Geospatial Data Project discussed previously on Slashgeo. Update: 10/20 13:04 GMT by S : Paul wrote an update of his own story.
Metadata is Useful
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The Mapping Hacks blog summarize interesting discussions about metadata held at the FOSS4G2006 conference last week. From the blog: "Without a focus on re-use, a focus on the client-side application interfaces, communicating the ability to make sense of the data visually, to speed up the data analytics; metadata is useless.
Without good metadata, data is useless. To make data dance for others, I need to clearly know what a web service will offer; to know how I can legally recombine and republish data in different ways. It helps to know how others have classified, verified, contextualised, represented data.
Without reusable, intelligible data, software is useless; machines will fall short of their capacity for making humans’ lives easier; semiautomation that allows us to bootstrap communication, to generate seemingly-meaningful new conclusions, faster."
Industry: UK e-Government Revised Metadata Standard 1 comment
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The UK e-Government has revised its metadata standards [447k pdf]. From the 58-pages document's introduction: "Since the publication of e-GMS 3.0 the mandated encoding scheme for the Subject
element has been replaced by the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary, prompting an
update to the Standard. This provided the opportunity to clarify some of the editorial
comments and to update examples in line with current guidance and preferred
practice."
Fact Sheet of The Risks of Metadata
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Via an internal mailing list, here's the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada fact sheet of the risks of metadata. Even if not directly targeting spatial data, the document is relevant. From the website: "Because the metadata is not readily visible, and because the susceptible applications may not provide any mechanism to warn users that comments are embedded or that attached documents contain metadata, you may unknowingly send confidential information to people outside your organization."
Industry: OGC WMS Server List
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Via an internal mailing list, here's a SkyLab list of servers which use the OGC WMS implementation, along with a resource from Refractions Research to discover WMS/MFS services. This can be associated to the OSGeo efforts for geodata discovery.
Data is the Next Intel Inside
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Following last week's story of Digital Globe's deal with Google, many voices pointed to the importance of data in the industry. From this short O'Reilly Radar entry: "As Microsoft's acquisition of Vexcel earlier this year also confirms, this is unlikely to be the only or last case of landgrabbing and does a good job in reminding us of Tim's argument that Data is the next Intel Inside -- a source of competitive advantage." There's a link to Jo Walsh's excellent post named "Why open geodata in an open source software foundation?" See also the numerous related stories below.
Killer Data – geoTorrent.org, Google Maps/DigitalGlobe and LiDAR - Part 1
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DirectionsMag have an editorial (part 1/2) about the challenges regarding data. From the editorial: [Nixon from ERMapper say] three missing things need to be fixed. 1. We can’t locate (geocode) things.
2. Current data licensing models and access modes are too restrictive. 3. Current data delivery mechanisms are poor.
Public Geospatial Data Project
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With the OSGeo came numerous great projects. One of them is the Public Geospatial Data Project which should include a repository of open geodata. According to the wiki, it mission is: " (A) Promote the use of open geospatial formats: Providing best-practise guidelines and examples for use of open and free standards for data (GML, WMS, WFS-T) and metadata (Dublin Core, RDF).
(B) Promote public access to state-collected geodata: Lead by example in demonstrating economic value and research activity generated by open access to public geographic information. (C) Run a repository of open geodata: A collection of geospatial datasets shall be hosted by the PGDP. Additionally, links to other open data repostories shall be collected. (D) Present and explain licenses for public geodata: The PGDP aims to collect licenses suitable for the publishing of public geodata. The license shall be presented along with a summary of its benefits and focus. " Related, let's not forget about geotorrent.org.
New Spatial Data on geotorrent.org 2 comments
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One great new tool to share spatial data is geotorrent.org. geoTorrent.org allows the efficient sharing of huge spatial data files. Amongst their newest additions (today!) you will find the 2005 Canadian Road Network and the Blue Marble global image from NASA.
The Importance of Metadata 2 comments
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GIS Monitor host the Intersect supplement of Professional Surveoyor Magazine which provides a discussion about the importance of metadata. From Intersect: "
Surveyors have been providing maps with
metadata to our clients for more than 2,000 years.
The only difference is we didn’t call it metadata.
We called it accurate and complete surveying. [...] Decision-makers NEED to know how the data was collected, processed, and assembled so they can make a good decision."
gvSIG Metadata Prototype is Now Available in gvSIG
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Virtual News Office, gvSIG Project writes "The gvSIG metadata prototype is now available. The aim of this prototype is to make catalogation of geospatial information easier, providing gvSIG with some specific features. First of all, it allows us to extract automatically some metadata from the data source (only from shapefiles right now). Secondlly it has an editor that allows us to complete the rest of the metadata. And finally we´ll be able to publish the metadata on a catalog server (only on Geonetwork right now). It is available in the Extensions section of the web page. Advice: To install this extension you must have correctly installed gvSIG 1.1.x version."
gvSIG has been mentioned regularly. See also related stories below.
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