Describing geospatial assets in the web of data: A metadata management scenario

Abstract

Metadata management is an essential enabling factor for geospatial assets because discovery, retrieval, and actual usage of the latter are tightly bound to the quality of these descriptions. Unfortunately, the multi-faceted landscape of metadata formats, requirements, and conventions makes it difficult to identify editing tools that can be easily tailored to the specificities of a given project, workgroup, and Community of Practice. Our solution is a template-driven metadata editing tool that can be customised to any XML-based schema. Its output is constituted by standards-compliant metadata records that also have a semantics-aware counterpart eliciting novel exploitation techniques. Moreover, external data sources can easily be plugged in to provide autocompletion functionalities on the basis of the data structures made available on the Web of Data. Beside presenting the essentials on customisation of the editor by means of two use cases, we extend the methodology to the whole life cycle of geospatial metadata. We demonstrate the novel capabilities enabled by RDF-based metadata representation with respect to traditional metadata management in the geospatial domain.