Geospatial Librarian

Summary  This post describes a technique for scraping Portal Discovery Metadata from a custom site and merging it with Standards Documentation Metadata in accompanying XML files. The example portal used is PASDA , but this could be modified for other repositories. Background The BTAA GDP aggregates metadata to provide a catalog of geospatial resources from public data providers.  There are generally two types of sources for the metadata: Portal Discovery Metadata : This is found within the data provider's portal application and may include minimal elements, such as title, date, description, and links.  Several structured data portal applications, such as ArcGIS Hub and Socrata provide this through their API as DCAT.  Other portals, such as CKAN, have APIs that expose the Portal Discovery Metadata in a custom schema.   Standards Documentation Metadata : This is a file that accompanies the dataset and includes much more detail, such as ...

These charts list the most useful metadata tools/models, when to use them, and problems they may cause. For more information, see the ArcGIS online documentation. Name Synchronize Type Tool When to Use When there is no metadata file yet or the dataset has changed. Description Uses the dataset to create or update technical metadata. This script will automatically run when you open the dataset in ArcCatalog in the Description tab (this is set in the ArcCatalog Options - Metadata tab. It will create or update many fields, including extent, coordinate system, geometry, format, size, and attribute field names. Since this script can run automatically when opening the item in ArcCatalog, it is not often necessary to call the script manually. However, if you have the option to run automatically turned off in the options, it can be called to update the item. It helpful to use for batch technical metadata creation or updating with an ArcPy script that iterates ...

So far, we have explored using ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Online, Oxygen, and Omeka for editing and transforming our geospatial metadata.  This week, we took a closer look at  Geonetwork 's capabilities as a metadata editor. Geonetwork is an open source, ISO-centric geospatial metadata catalog that can also function as a geoportal.  Judging from its example use cases, it is primarily utilized in Europe and Africa. For installation, it does require a little more setup time & knowledge than the other editing tools we have been using, but once installed, the user experience is quite straightforward.  I installed a local-only, test version on my desktop, and here are a few highlights from what I have discovered: Users & Groups Each University can be set up as a working group within a Geonetwork instance, and each user can be assigned editing permissions related to specific groups. Import Metadata files can be imported in a batch. I had success importi...