Geospatial Librarian

This chart compares the metadata information lost when converting FGDC metadata into ISO 19139 using different tools & methods.  Seven fields are compared using three different software applications. (ArcGIS offers multiple metadata scripts and four methods are compared here.)   Each of the methods attempted lost some piece of the metadata. Note: this is not an exhaustive chart, as the original metadata file was very large.  Other problematic translation issues that I have not addressed here involve temporal extents, file identifiers, and XML formatting errors. * See previous post for explanation of lost coordinates

This post explores in greater detail how the ArcGIS Upgrade metadata process works.  The tool can run on either a standalone metadata file or a dataset in conjunction with a metadata file.  Although the tool will work in both cases, the results will be different.  I specifically wanted to examine how it processes a standalone FGDC XML file to identify possible data loss and formatting issues.  My investigations showed that the tool was designed for the second case (dataset + metadata) and has flaws when used for a standalone file. Esri definition:  The   Upgrade Metadata  tool copies information in existing FGDC or ESRI-ISO metadata elements that are not included in the ArcGIS metadata format to the equivalent ArcGIS metadata elements. Upgrading doesn't alter the item's ArcGIS-internal content: the geoprocessing history, thumbnail, enclosures, and so on. Upgrading doesn't remove any existing FGDC- and ESRI-ISO-format elements. Properties of the ...

A few oddball issues have come up while working in ArcCatalog that I am listing here.  These are aspects of the ArcGIS environment that have caused mysterious errors that took a while to troubleshoot.  I will add more issues to this page as I come across them. If your metadata file is named metadata.xml, Arc does not show it in the catalog list.  It is essentially invisible.  If you change the name to something else, it will appear. If you use secure linkages in your metadata (https), Arc will not export the link into an ISO standards file. ( see this blog post ) If your folder name begins with a number, and you run a batch script with the folder as the environment workspace, it may report that the items are not iterable.  Change the name of the folder to fix this error. If you run the Upgrade metadata tool on a standalone XML file, you might lose metadata - particularly the spatial coordinates ( see this blog post )