NAL GeoData introduction

GeoData is part of the services offered by the National Agricultural Library to assist USDA Agencies in the creation and management of geospatial metadata using the ISO 19115 family of standards.

There are several hundred metadata records created during pilot usage of GeoData in 2017. While GeoData can function as a geospatial data catalog, the current emphasis is supporting metadata creation.

Types of records in NAL GeoData

NAL GeoData users can find, view, and create a variety of metadata, data, and informational records. GoeData does not store or publish the geospatialdata itself. The GeoData metadata records contain links to the actual data.

ISO 19115 records

The main ISO 19115 records is the main product from GeoData.

GeoData can be used to validate that a metadata record meets the content and format requirements in the ISO standard.

Metadata Templates

Templates are skeletal metadata records. They are a starting point for creating new records. This mirrors the common practice of creating metadata by copy/paste from a similar geospatial data. The template contains standard verbiage. Customizing a regional or national template with local details can reduce the time to create metadata records.

Feature catalogs

GeoData also facilitates the creation of ISO 19110 Feature Catalogs. The Feature Catalog provides documentation for the data elements and the characteristics. A Feature Catalog is a substantially enhanced version of the Entity-Attribution Information in theFGDC legacy metatat format.

An advantage of the ISO standrd is that a 19110 record can be associated with any number of 19115 records that have the same data definitions. Feature catalogs can be created using the user interface, extracted from the entity-attributes section of a legacy metadata record, imported from a csv file or via GIS web services.

Reusable ISO 19115 metadata components

NAL GeoData can store reusable components to refer to people, organizations, online resources, and any other component that may repeat between resources. Reusable components offer many benefits, including better accuracy and consistency, time-saving when creating new records, and more comprehensive methods of changing components that may be in flux (i.e. position title changes, updated web site addresses, new email or phone number, etc.). NAL GeoData curators encourage using reusable snippets whenever possible.