Get a New Strategy Five easy ways to streamline geospatial metadata production By Jessica L. Zichichi and Caroline S. Roberts, Innovate!, Inc. Is metadata something that your organization can just never seem to get to? Is developing metadata for your resources difficult and time consuming? Do you think metadata compliancy is just too complicated? If so, you may want to rethink your metadata development strategy. Simply making a few changes in your metadata production process will not only reduce the time it takes to develop metadata but will also greatly improve the quality of your records. Use the five steps provided below and you will be creating high-quality, compliant metadata before you can say, "Federal Geographic Data Committee's Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata!" This tutorial provides some basic recommendations for improving metadata production. It assumes the reader knows how to use ArcGIS ArcCatalog and has some familiarity with geospatial data and metadata topics in general. Although there are currently two standards available for documenting geospatial metadata in the United States--the Federal Geographic Data Committee's (FGDC) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM) and the North American Profile (NAP) of ISO 19115/19139--this tutorial focuses on implementing the FGDC CSDGM. Although focused specifically on the implementation of the FGDC CSDGM standard, the principles and techniques described are applicable to those implementing the NAP of ISO 19115/19139. n If data quality and processing steps are important, section two should be included. n If your data includes attributes, then section five will be required. n If you distribute your resources, you will want to review section six. It can be useful to consider each section when creating your implementation, prioritizing those sections that are most critical to your needs. Depending on the size of your organization and the number of metadata creators, the steps needed for developing an implementation may vary. For large organizations, it may be instructive to form a workgroup to review your chosen standard, define language for important fields, and identify the fields that you will require. Once these issues have been decided, you can develop a template (described in the fifth step in this article) along with descriptive documentation for your metadata developers. An example implementation developed by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for geospatial metadata (called the EPA Geospatial Metadata Technical Specification Version 1.0) is available at EPA's Web site (www.epa.gov/geospatial/ policies.html). Taking the time to develop an implementation as a first step in improving metadata production will greatly assist in making subsequent metadata development easier. You will improve consistency across your organization while saving time and ensuring that your records include the information you want. For additional background on metadata topics, visit the Innovate metadata training Web site. The training modules provided at this Web site can help familiarize you with the basics of the FGDC CSDGM, the NAP of ISO 19115/19139 standard, metadata catalogs, and contributing information to Geospatial One-Stop. Step One Create a Metadata Implementation for Your Organization Developing a metadata implementation is an important but often overlooked step in metadata development. In fact, many people are not familiar with the concept of developing a metadata implementation. A metadata implementation defines how to interpret a metadata standard for a particular group or organization. Because many metadata standards are large and often include a number of free-text fields, it can be useful to review the standard with your organization's objectives in mind and develop an organizational implementation specifying requirements that fit your needs. This will help standardize the way your group produces metadata. Your organization may develop metadata for a number of interrelated reasons that can include providing a record of processing, serving as a legal document, or enabling resource sharing. The nature of your metadata needs will determine how your implementation is structured. n If your concerns include FGDC minimum compliancy, you will need to include FGDC CSDGM sections one and seven (required for minimum compliancy). Step Two Choose an Appropriate Metadata Editing Tool Developing metadata can be especially challenging if you are not using the right tools to help streamline and automate the process. Making the right choice in editing tools will increase your productivity considerably. Some considerations for choosing a tool may include software availability (freeware, licensed, or purchased product), the editing environment (Web based or desktop), flexibility, ease of use, access to help, and support for full FGDC and/or ISO standards. In some cases, your organization may choose a combination of available www.esri.com 46 ArcUser Spring 2009