Pragmatic Metadata Management for Integration into Multiple Spatial Data Infrastructure Systems and Platforms
Abstract
While there has been a convergence towards a limited number of standards for representing knowledge (metadata) about geospatial (and other) data objects and collections, there exist a variety of community conventions around the specific use of those standards and within specific data discovery and access systems. This combination of limited (but multiple) standards and conventions creates a challenge for system developers that aspire to participate in multiple data infrastrucutres, each of which may use a different combination of standards and conventions. While Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a shared standard for encoding most metadata, traditional direct XML transformations (XSLT) from one standard to another often result in an imperfect transfer of information due to incomplete mapping from one standard's content model to another. This paper presents the work at the University of New Mexico's Earth Data Analysis Center (EDAC) in which a unified data and metadata management system has been developed in support of the storage, discovery and access of heterogeneous data products. This system, the Geographic Storage, Transformation and Retrieval Engine (GSTORE) platform has adopted a polyglot database model in which a combination of relational and document-based databases are used to store both data and metadata, with some metadata stored in a custom XML schema designed as a superset of the requirements for multiple target metadata standards: ISO 19115-2/19139/19110/19119, FGCD CSDGM (both with and without remote sensing extensions) and Dublin Core. Metadata stored within this schema is complemented by additional service, format and publisher information that is dynamically "injected" into produced metadata documents when they are requested from the system. While mapping from the underlying common metadata schema is relatively straightforward, the generation of valid metadata within each target standard is necessary but not sufficient for integration into multiple data infrastructures, as has been demonstrated through EDAC's testing and deployment of metadata into multiple external systems: Data.Gov, the GEOSS Registry, the DataONE network, the DSpace based institutional repository at UNM and semantic mediation systems developed as part of the NASA ACCESS ELSeWEB project. Each of these systems requires valid metadata as a first step, but to make most effective use of the delivered metadata each also has a set of conventions that are specific to the system. This presentation will provide an overview of the underlying metadata management model, the processes and web services that have been developed to automatically generate metadata in a variety of standard formats and highlight some of the specific modifications made to the output metadata content to support the different conventions used by the multiple metadata integration endpoints.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFMIN34A..03B
- Keywords:
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- 1926 INFORMATICS Geospatial;
- 1982 INFORMATICS Standards;
- 1946 INFORMATICS Metadata;
- 1936 INFORMATICS Interoperability