Bridging geospatial metadata standards towards distributed metadata information systems

Within the last few years, more and more metadata information systems (MIS) have been offered in the WWW bnasing, however, upon quite a number of different standarts and formats. This also applies to geodata systems. Therefore, it is often impossible for a user to get comparable information from different MIS. To harmonize the access to different sstems and make more information available, it is necessary to bridge the different metadata standart/models This paper deals with aspects influencing the development of a geospatial metadata infrastructure and metadata information systems/catalogue systems (MIS/CS). Different approaches to solve problems caused by different overlapping metadata standarts are examined. With a focus on the European region and Germany it describes the current situation in the field of geospatial metadata in comparison with the USA and points out the need of connecting existing MIS and metadata bases. Several metadata standarts/models are compared with references to a practical example. Central topics of discussion are determination of a suitable metadata model and method as well as proposals for architectures which are apt to bridge metadata information systems (MIS) following different metadata models