Automatic Spatial Metadata Update: a New Approach
Hamed Olfat, Abbas Rajabifard, Mohsen Kalantari · 2010
Spatial metadata is a vital tool for spatial data management, retrieval and distribution. It is also a critical component for any spatial data sharing platform which provides users with information about the purpose, quality, actuality and accuracy of spatial datasets. With the amount of spatial data exchanged through the web environment, the demand for automatic spatial metadata creation and updating to describe such resources is increasing. However, automatic spatial metadata updating is still in its infancy and automatic approaches are being explored by researchers. So far different processes and tools have been developed which generate and update a limited number of spatial metadata elements in different standard schemes automatically, thus a large amount of spatial data elements need to be imported manually. In order to improve this situation, this paper aims at exploring a new synchronisation approach based on XML/GML technologies to automate spatial metadata update process, by which dataset properties are read from the dataset file and written into its metadata file automatically. The paper first discusses the important role of metadata in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) as an enabling platform and proposes an architecture to manage spatial metadata. It then