Project Approach

GeoData@NAL strives to develop tools and services to help data creators and providers efficiently create effective metadata to meet Federal and USDA regulations. We recognize that the data and metadata creators often differ from future data users. Tools for both data providers and data consumers may have different requirements. We provide highly usable and effective tools for both communities. For example:

• Creators should not have to enter the same information numerous times

  • Our pilot catalog easily stores reusable metadata “snippets” such as contact information for people and organizations, commonly used web resources (landing pages), and other selectable “boilerplate” items.

  • Users can create and customize more complete and consistent metadata templates to contain larger amounts of pre-filled metadata content. This approach is particularly beneficial for similar geospatial data products with modifications or customizations for each product type or category.

• We strive to automate as much of the metadata creation process as possible. Examples of these automation tools include:

  • Conversion of metadata from other standards into the ISO 19115 formats

  • Extracting information from existing databases or spreadsheets

  • Automated creation of metadata for a series of products

People-Centric

Our emphasis includes identifying tools, features, and services that will help the geospatial data and metadata creators, as well as those who want to use these tools for a new purpose.

Technology Agnostic

The NAL GeoData Team selected an open-source geospatial data catalog system as the basis for our toolset. The catalog is fully compliant with the ISO 19115 standards, so the metadata created or managed by GeoData can also be managed by any ISO 19115-based catalog. The GeoData project uses both open source and commercial tools, catalogs, and search portals.