Metadata for the Oregon Coast Geospatial Clearinghouse : concept, implementation, and maintenance

Geographical data and information are virtually unlimited in their quantity and are oftentimes scattered throughout a multitude of locations and stored in various formats on a wide variety of platforms. The Oregon Coast Geospatial Clearinghouse (OCGC) is a web-based central repository for metadata (data about data) corresponding to collected data for the Oregon Coastal Zone. The OCGC is a collaborative effort between multiple agencies in order to raise awareness about what data exist and to encourage cooperation for sharing and distributing available data. The clearinghouse is designed to enable easy access and usage for any person wanting or needing to obtain geospatial data or metadata for the Oregon coast. Metadata creation, and development and maintenance of the OCGC are discussed in this paper. One major objective of the project was to increase the visibility and utility of the clearinghouse by contacting potential participants and asking for their contributions of data and metadata. A second goal was to develop methods for assisting these agencies in contributing metadata, through the use of existing metadata-generating tools. Two metadata tools were explored and evaluated: a free, public-domain ArcView metadata collector extension developed by the NOAA Coastal Services Center and a commercial software application called the Spatial Metadata Management System (SMMS). The third and most important objective of the project was to create a template for an abstracted form of metadata, that, while FGDC-compliant, would not be as lenghty or cumbersome as the full FGDC content standard. Finally, recommendations for the future of the OCGC are discussed