SPATIAL METADATA AUTOMATION: A NEW APPROACH

Metadata play a key role to facilitate accessing to up-to-date spatial information and plays an important aspect in finding and delivering high quality spatial information services to users. In particular, metadata is an important element in functioning and facilitating spatial data infrastructure (SDI) initiatives. With huge amount of spatial information being generated, a spatial application must be sufficiently flexible to extract and update spatial metadata automatically. By contrast, in current applications, the extract and update process is undertaken manually, making changes to spatial metadata relatively more difficult and expensive. This paper explores different approaches for automating spatial metadata and the impacts of these approaches on critical components of metadata such as standards, data model so that the process of updating or extracting spatial metadata – where feasible – becomes automatic. This approach distinguishes between already existing methods by emphasising on new technologies like Web 2.0. Within a metadata application, different approaches of data modelling including integrated spatial data and metadata model, user generated tags and metadata standards will be presented and discussed