Metadata is literally data about data. Of course, in ordinary life it sounds a little too much, but in the world of heavy sets of information, it is metadata that makes it easier to navigate among sets that may be named the same but created by different manufacturers, with different purposes and, of course, at different times. It is for such situations that short but concentrated information about the data containing the necessary minimum information about the contents of the set was invented, which will help to choose it without downloading and unpacking it beforehand. Agree that, recalling the analogy of classic analog libraries, it is more pleasant and easier to leaf through one compact box with cards arranged alphabetically, containing the most important information about the publication, than to mindlessly run between endless shelves, reading all names of books arranged according to other principles. Catalogs of the Vernadskyi library Metadata was developed to speed up navigation between existing data sets that accumulate over time and simply viewing them to get an idea of ​​their content becomes more difficult. It is one thing if you work only with personal sets and organize and store them according to some own logic, and when the use of sets reaches the level of public services that can contain hundreds of sets of information, then there is a natural need to catalog, filter, and speed up their search by important parameters using search tools. Since our software tools are created for the use of data in accordance with the requirements of domestic legislation, we take the metadata profile for the geoinformation services of the NSDI as the basis of our own developments. The metadata profile for geospatial datasets and metadata for geospatial information services of NSDI includes 26 and 20 elements, respectively, out of more than 400 total metadata set elements defined in ISO 19115-1:2014. The names and types of these metadata elements comply with international and national standards:

  • ISO 19115-1:2014 "Geographic information. Metadata. Part 1 - Fundamentals";
  • ISO/TS 19115-3:2016 "Geographic information. Metadata. Part 3 - XML ​​implementation scheme for basic concepts";
  • ISO 19157:2013 "Geographic information. Quality of geospatial data".

Applied metadata creation services must ensure the formation of metadata sets in XML formats according to the schemes defined in the international standard ISO/TS 19115-3:2016, the formal description of which is publicly available on the official website of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) at the link. Therefore, our experts, based on the standards mentioned above, developed a special widget for creating metadata data sets right in the GIS editor. Users now have the ability to view the content of metadata about a set or create or edit it if it is not full enough for search tools This functionality will make it much easier to work with existing sets or when creating new ones, because it allows you not only to work with a data set directly from the editor, but also to create metadata for it, without missing important parameters that the metadata must contain according to the requirements of the standards. Users can:

  • specify the name of the set,
  • specify the language of the set data,
  • choose an existing or add a new data holder,
  • choose an existing or add a new data producer,
  • specify the method of presentation of data objects in the set,
  • frequency of update of set data,
  • add a short text description if necessary,
  • add files to preview metadata content.