Part of my task at San Mateo County GIS (Apr-Oct 2011) was
to set up a process for publishing geospatial metadata along with the County’s
map services. We looked at Esri’s free
Geoportal Server. But we decided that
was overkill for the County’s data sets.
And we were also having trouble with metadata authoring and publishing
with ArcGIS v10. We needed to publish
metadata through ArcGIS Server and the REST API, or through ArcGIS Online where
the public would access our map services.
But we couldn’t do either one.
Why doesn’t Esri support metadata publishing through ArcGIS
Server and ArcGIS Online?
This is what I've concluded from my conversations with
several Esri customer reps and product managers, including Sud Menon:
Back in the late 90s the federal government wanted to save
money by sharing data so it didn’t have to pay to collect the same data
twice. The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) thought it was a good
idea to develop a metadata standard and taxonomy to enable fast searching on
tags, keywords, and technical data descriptions. FGDC figured that vendors like Esri should
support this with geosptial metadata creators and search capability. Esri agreed, probably because the USG is
their biggest customer.
So Esri built the first geoportal that provided the search
and share capability for Dept of Interior’s geodata.gov site, based on FGDC
standard metadata. Esri (and everyone
else in big government) thought that government organizations could mandate that
their GIS units would make the effort to document all their geodata in the FGDC
metadata standard. But it didn’t
happen, because it's too big an investment for most organizations.
When Esri developed ArcGIS Online, they opted not to support
full FGDC metadata either. And when they
developed ArcGIS Server v9 and v10, they again gave it little attention. Esri focused instead on simple key words and minimal
tag information -- less metadata for more audience – to keep the hurdle low for
sharing geodata.
Esri says that ArcGIS Server will support metadata
publishing through the geodatabase in the future. In Q&ADiscussion before the 2011 UC, Esri announced:
“ArcGIS Server 10.1 will automatically capture and store
basic metadata about the GIS services you create and allow you to enhance
metadata documentation with descriptions, summaries, tags and other
information. Any client accessing these services as well as anyone using
ArcGIS.com and the Portal for ArcGIS will be able to leverage this
information.... you can create and
update your GIS service metadata using the tools that are built-in to ArcGIS.
This metadata will be available via a simple URL.”
Lots of organizations went to the trouble of creating
structured metadata. But San Mateo
County has only a loosely-structured html-based metadata catalog. The best approach for the County now seems to
be a blend of FGDC-like metadata documentation for geodata that is complex, that
must be accurate and precise, and/or is a component of a geodata model that is
shared among GIS experts. And to author
and publish a more compact set of simpler (but still standardized) tags and
keywords for most geodata shared with partners and the public.
Standard tags is what we used for “metadata lite” with the
San Mateo County Geodata Catalog.
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