What are metadata and why are they important?
Metadata
- are information about
data, such as its geographic coverage, quality, completeness, accuracy,
etc.
- are a "pedigree" of sorts for a data set and
helps you to judge its "fitness for use" or reliability, thereby
helping you to use it more appropriately and efficiently.
- allow a potential user, for comparative
purposes, to understand how the data were collected.
- provide the all-important details of how you can actually obtain
the data in question, or who best to contact.
Data that do not have accompanying
metadata are often hard to find, difficult to access, troublesome to
integrate, and perplexing to understand or interpret. If you have invested
a significant amount of effort and money in the collection of your data,
especially if you wish others to be able to use and re-use them,
that investment will surely be enhanced by having the appropriate
metadata on hand.
A national content standard has been established by the
Federal Geograhic Data Committee (FGDC) for metadata,
ensuring that it fully outlines all the vital information
pertaining to a data set's source, content, format, accuracy,
and lineage (i.e., what processing changes the data set has gone
through over time). All of the metadata records in the Oregon Coast
Geospatial Clearinghouse are FGDC-compliant.
Understanding the basics of the content standard...
Some additional information pertinent to Oregon...
The content standard was developed by the FGDC as one way of
implementing the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).
President Clinton's Executive Order 12906 called for the establishment
of the NSDI in order to promote sharing of geospatial data throughout
all levels of government, academia, and private and non-profit sectors.
View the slideshow about the NSDI (and the defining issues of data access, framework data sets and metadata)
Clearinghouses are a big part of NSDI implementation. They
provide a valuable means, via the wonders of
distributed computing, for advertising the
existence of useful data, as well as their quality, inventory, and
further collection requirements. In so doing, clearinghouses
also help to minimize the duplication of effort involved in spatial
data collection and processing.
What exactly is a clearinghouse, how does it work, and why is it so very important for effective access to metadata, and ultimately data???
Enjoy another slideshow!
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