Slashgeo

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."

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).

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."

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."

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.

Tommy scratchpad offers an entry regarding metadata of OGC's Open Web Services (OWS). From the entry: "From publishing to discovery, lack of metadata in OWS endpoints results in increased metadata management away from source, as well as crappy search results. So here’s some friendly advice: Service Metadata [...] Content Metadata [...] From here, OGC Catalogues will be able to harvest your metadata and provide useful search results. For wider spread discovery, throw an OpenSearch definition in front of your CSW. Wrap your OWS endpoints in KML/GeoRSS documents (Geo Sitemaps too), and you’ll power mainstream use of your stuff." Follow the link to learn about what the Service and Content metadata advices actually are. See previous stores about metadata below.