Metadata Resources

DUBLIN CORE

Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
http://dublincore.org

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is the recently re-designed and official site for the Dublin Core (DC) project. The fifteen-element metadata standard is the product of a series of a number of workshops which began in 1995. Intended to serve international users in a flexible manner, the elements are all optional, repeatable, and labeled with descriptive names. Metadata generated from this scheme may be represented in a number of ways (e.g., HTML, RDF) for use on the Internet. The new design has made it easier to find the latest information on such things as the DC element set, usage guides, tools, and the workshop series.

dc-General Listserv
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/DC-GENERAL.html

The dc-General listserv, a by-product of the Warwick Metadata Workshop, focuses on issues relating to the Dublin Core scheme. The list's archives and subscription instructions are available through the ROADS (Resource Organization and Discovery in Subject-based Services) site, which in turn is sponsored by the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the UK.

GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Metadata
http://www.fgdc.gov/fgdc/fgdc.html

http://fgdc.er.usgs.gov/metadata/metadata.html

http://www.fgdc.gov/standards/standards.html

This site is sponsored by the FGDC, which is made up of seventeen federal agencies. Working with such partners as state and local governments, the academic community, and industry, the FGDC is supervising the development of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) with the goal of sharing geographic data through standards, policies, and procedures. Through subcommittees and working groups, the FGDC has several geospatial data standards completed or in some stage of development. These include the Cadastral Data Content Standard, the Spatial Data Transfer Standard, the Address Content Standard, and the Government Unit Boundary Data Content Standard.

http://fgdc.er.usgs.gov/metadata/contstan.html

The FGDC has developed the Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM) to be used by all federal agencies. This metadata standard is composed of 334 different elements (119 of which only contain sub-elements). The FGDC also coordinates the National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse for participants worldwide interested in sharing digital geospatial data that conforms to the CSDGM.

NBII Metadata Clearinghouse
http://www.nbii.gov/datainfo/metadata/

The NBII (National Biological Information Infrastructure) site is maintained by the Biological Resources Division of the United States Geological Survey to "provide swift user access to biological databases, information products, directories, and guides maintained by Federal, State, and local government agencies, non-government institutions and private sector organizations in the United States and around the world." The NBII Metadata Clearinghouse, a participating node in the FGDC's National Spatial Data Clearinghouse, contains standardized data descriptions following the format of the Biological Profile of the FGDC's Content Standards for Digital Geospatial Metadata.

NASA Global Change Master Directory
http://gcmd.gsfc.nasa.gov/

NASA has created the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD), a free database directory detailing over 7,300 data sets (covering such topics as climate change, biosphere, hydrosphere, oceans, geology, geography, human dimensions) relevant to global change research. Descriptions are standardized using the Directory Interchange Format (DIF). The DIF metadata scheme incorporates several fields including Identifier, Title, Parameters, Keyword, and Spatial Coverage. DIF sets are completely compatible with the Federal Geographic Data Committee's (FGDC) Content Standard on Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM).

Minnesota Land Management Information Center
http://www.lmic.state.mn.us/

LMIC, a division of the Minnesota Planning Agency, is charged with coordinating the "effective use of digital geographic data to support public policy and government operations" in the state. The Center, as a member of the GIS Standards Committee of the Minnesota Governor's Council on Geographic Information, helped develop a standard format for GIS metadata (the Minnesota Geographic Metadata Guidelines) based upon the federal model of the CSDGM (Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata). LMIC makes available software (DataLogr) to aid data holders in recording their metadata in conformance with the Minnesota guidelines. By arrangement, LMIC offers project assistance and research- and technology-related services.

Featured links at the LMIC site include the 2000 Minnesota Geographic Data Catalog (which gives information about data holdings at LMIC as well as other state and federal agencies), the Minnesota GIS/LIS Consortium, and MetroGIS. Additionally, the Minnesota Geographic Data Clearinghouse, a node of the FGDC's National Spatial Data Infrastructure Clearinghouse, contains information on over seventy documented state-related geographic databases; both clearinghouses are accessible through LMIC's site. The Minnesota GeoGateway assists users in locating data sets specific to the state and surrounding region through search capabilities bounded by geographic area, keyword, or time period.

GIS Data Deli
http://deli.dnr.state.mn.us/

The GIS Data Deli site is a service of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. Visitors may download raw spatial data pertaining to the state for use with GIS-specific software, image processing systems, or traditional databases; no online map composition or viewing is possible. Users capture the data through a process involving specifying geographic areas, layers and data elements of interest. Detailed metadata conforming to the Minnesota Geographic Metadata Guidelines is available for each layer.

MetroGIS
http://www.metrogis.org/

http://www.datafinder.org/

This Minnesota GIS project, organized and supported by the Metropolitan Council, brings together data resources from various contributors within the seven county area of the Twin Cities (Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, and Washington). In addition to providing project updates and reports, MetroGIS has developed the Data Finder Service to assist access to the databases held by its participants. Users may search the index by theme, contributor, or metadata content, as well as being able to view the entire list of resources. The content of each data resource is summarized and accompanied by metadata.

MetaData and WWW Mapping Sites
http://www.blm.gov/gis/nsdi.html

Hosted by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Geospatial Information Center, site consists of over one hundred annotated links to other geospatial metadata-related sites. A word of warning: this site has not been updated since 1998, so some links may be out of date.

GIS Portal
http://www.gisportal.com/

This site, presented by the Harvard Design and Mapping Company, provides visitors with hundreds of GIS and map-related links. General areas of interest include conferences, breaking news, pointers to other GIS resource lists, data and software, academic research, agencies and governments worldwide (from the municipal/local level on up), and commercial and non-government sites.

GISLinx
http://www.gislinx.com/

This is a commercial site offering over 1,700 searchable categorized links to GIS-related sites.

GLOBAL INFORMATION LOCATOR SERVICE

GILS (Global Information Locator Service / Government Information Locator Service)
http://info.er.usgs.gov/gils/index.html

This is the home page of the U.S. Federal GILS project, which is based upon the international information search standard ISO 10163 (ANSI Z39.50). The site contains general information about the project, as well as links to other federal, state, and international GILS ventures.

Florida GILS
http://dlis.dos.state.fl.us/fgils/

Administered by the Department of State, State Library of Florida, this site has information about the state agencies (legislative and judicial) in a central location. Also included are links to various resources including job lines, freenets and telephone directories.

New York GILS
http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/ils

Similar to California, New York is providing a single point of access to information on New York State Government, including the judicial and legislative branches. An entry provides an address, contacts, phone numbers, function and organizational statement. Users can search the Internet sources of New York State Government by agency and subject. Also included is a phone book and a list of Freedom of Information officers.

Find NC
http://www.ncgils.state.nc.us/

Find NC is the official gateway into North Carolina's government information locator service, representing Phase I of this on-going project. Administrators promise that "Phase 2 will provide a comprehensive set of NC GILS Guidelines, improved display of NC GILS records, additional metadata sources, and extended metadata management functionality." The work has been coordinated with North Carolina's statewide technical data architecture. A first release of the guidelines is scheduled for late May 2000.

OhioGILS
http://www.gsd.das.state.oh.us/gils/gils.html

As an on-going project developed by the State Archives Department of the Ohio Historical Society in cooperation with the state's Department of Administration, OhioGILS draws its information, in part, from an automated, online state agency records retention schedule system. Visitors can learn about online and off-line individual documents, record series, electronic publications, and automated systems.

PhILS (Philadelphia Information Locator Service)
http://www.phila.gov/phils/index.htm

PhILS is intended to provide information about Philadelphia's active and archival city government records. The service represents a cooperative venture involving the Philadelphia Department of Records and the Free Library of Philadelphia. Summaries of the function and history of individual agencies is available to provide context for the records.

Washington GILS
http://find-it.state.wa.us/compass

Find-It! Washington, established by the State Library in collaboration with the State Archives and Department of Information Services, will assist the public in locating and accessing the most commonly requested information.

AGLS (Australian Government Locator Service)
http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/gov_online/agls/summary.html

This is the official site for the Australian Government Locator Service maintained by the National Archives of Australia. The AGLS metadata standard, which is based upon the Dublin Core scheme, consists of nineteen elements. The goal of the project is to increase the visibility and accessibility of government services and information on the Internet. A users manual is offered in both PDF and HTML formats. Additionally, the NAA plans on developing an interactive thesaurus to facilitate user-friendly, natural-language searching. Other links lead visitors to additional information about metadata research and the evolution of AGLS.

SELECTED PROJECTS

Bridges: Minnesota's Gateway to Environmental Information
http://bridges.state.mn.us/

The Bridges project represented a collaboration between Minnesota's environmental agencies with the goal of providing easy access to their electronic resources such as web pages, PDF documents, databases, and geographic data. Resources were cataloged using the Dublin Core metadata scheme and are located through a simple cross-agency search engine (the Inktomi-powered North Star at the state's main portal). Although the project was completed in July 2000, the web site still offers a number of resources to visitors, including best practice guidelines for web metadata, information on metadata tools, project reports, as well as links to participating agencies, other regional and federal environmental sites, and the Minnesota Governor's Council on Geographic Information.

SPIRT Recordkeeping Metadata Standards Project
http://rcrg.dstc.edu.au/research/spirt/index.html

http://www.archivists.org.au/events/conf99/spirt.html

At its outset, this Australian research project sought to "provide a framework for standardising sets of recordkeeping metadata that can be attributed to records from their point of creation, e.g., by embedding, encapsulation or linking to metadata stores. It will develop a standardised set of interoperable recordkeeping metadata elements, classified according to purpose, and mapped against related generic and sector-specific metadata sets." SPIRT culminated in the development of a recordkeeping metadata schema that can map to other sets.

RLG (Research Libraries Group) Working Group on Preservation Issues of Metadata—Final Report (May 1998)
http://www.rlg.org/preserv/presmeta.html

With an eye towards application to digital collections, this group examined two metadata systems: the Dublin Core and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's USMARC-based core record standard. A list of recommended elements is included.

EPA Scientific Metadata Standards Project
http://www.lbl.gov/~olken/epa.html

This is a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency project. The goal of the work is to develop and implement metadata strategies for the agency, with particular attention being paid to the "providing integrated metadata servers, which will support multiple metadata standards (e.g., GILS and FGDC) and multiple uses (browsing, system development, etc.)." This site provides extensive links to other metadata-related pages including projects by other federal agencies, conferences, library efforts, archives and museums work, and standards organizations.

IMS Metadata
http://www.imsproject.org/metadata/index.html

This is an Instructional Management Systems (IMS) project sponsored by EDUCOM in partnership with industry, standards organizations, and government. The group has developed metadata specifications, based in part upon Dublin Core elements, to facilitate the location and use of information resources for education available via the Internet. Version 1.2 of the IMS "Meta-data Specification" was released in May 2001 and is available in HTML and PDF forms; it is comprised of three parts: the Meta-data Information Model; the Meta-data XML Binding Specification; and the Meta-data Best Practices and Implementation Guide.

UKOLN Metadata Page
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/

The UKOLN group reviews current approaches to metadata and is involved in six relating to resource description: CEDARS (CURL Exemplars in Digital ARchiveS), DESIRE Metadata Registry, IMesh Toolkit (architecture and toolkit for distributed gateways), HILT (High Level Thesaurus), Renardus (Academic Subject Gateway Service Europe), RSLP Collection Description (enabling consistent collection description across Research Support Libraries Programme funded projects), and SCHEMAS (forum for metadata schema implementors). The group has been active in a number of projects in the past, including BIBLINK, NewsAgent, ROADS, and TF-CHIC.

CONFERENCES

First IEEE Metadata Conference (April 1996)
http://www.computer.org/conferen/meta96/meta_home.html

Technical papers relating to the following topics are available through this site: metadata usage, metadata modeling, data mining for metadata extraction, metadata standards, metadata for system integration, data stewardship, metadata issues related to the EOSDIS program, ontologies, common metadata models for metadata.

Second IEEE Metadata Conference (September 1997)
http://www.llnl.gov/liv_comp/metadata/md97.html

Technical papers relating to the following topics are available through this site: metadata for management and modeling; semantic representation of the WWW, and mass storage and warehousing; metadata mining and extraction; metadata catalogs; systems for managing metadata; application-specific metadata; digital library metadata issues; standards; and working systems.

Third IEEE Metadata Conference (April 1999)
http://computer.org/conferen/proceed/meta/1999/

Several topics are covered by the technical papers available through this site, including metadata for data management; metadata and enterprise-wide security administration; e-mail metadata; end-user metadata and XML; data warehouse metadata; and search technologies.

RLG (Research Libraries Group) Metadata Summit (July 1997)
http://www.rlg.org/meta9707.html

With a focus on the Dublin Core elements, conference participants explored the use of metadata as a tool to improve access to non-HTML based information resources accessible via the Internet.

STANDARDS

Metadata Standards Directory (CEESE)
http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/meta.html

Maintained by CESSE (Centre for Economic and Social Studies on the Environment) these pages provide visitors with an annotated list of lists dealing with metadata standards, as well as direct links to metadata standard sites. As a word of warning: this site has not in the past received regular updates, so some of the links may be outdated.

The Library of Congress Standards Page
http://lcweb.loc.gov/standards/

This site is presented by the Library of Congress to provide a gateway to information on several "information community" standards including MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloging), EAD (Encoded Archival Description), the Z39.50 protocol for information retrieval (ANSI/NISO Z39.50; ISO 23950), and the ISSN (International Standard Serial Number). Links to the home pages of several national and international standards organizations such as NISO (National Information Standards Organization), ANSI (American National Standards Institute), and ISO (International Organization for Standardization) are also featured.

W3C: World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/Metadata/

Among other projects, the W3C metadata group is working on developing the Resource Description Framework (RDF)—"a foundation for processing metadata" that "provides interoperability between applications that exchange machine-understandable information on the Web." Early in 1999, the group released recommended RDF data model and syntax specifications, along with a proposed schema specification.

Meta Data Coalition and the Object Management Group (OMG)
http://www.omg.org/

The Meta Data Coalition (MDC) is an alliance of vendors and business users working towards the "definition, implementation and ongoing evolution of a metadata interchange format and its support mechanisms." The group has developed the Open Information Model (OIM), a metadata standard for facilitating data sharing and re-use that is based upon three standards: the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and the Structured Query Language (SQL). The OIM incorporates an earlier offering, the Meta Data Interchange Specification (MDIS). MDC members include Microsoft, Sysbase, Compuware, and the Information Policy and Plans branch of the Australian Department of Defense.

The Object Management Group (OMG) is a not-for-profit consortium that "produces and maintains computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications." Its membership roster includes organizations from private industry, government, and academia. Well-known OMG specifications include CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), UML (Unified Modeling Language), the MOF (Meta-Object Facility), and XMI (XML metadata Interchange). All OMG specifications, including those still under development, are available free of charge for download. In September 2000, the MDC and the OMG announced that the MDC would be merged into the OMG and work will be undertaken to integrate the competing standards.

Recordkeeping Metadata Standard for Commonwealth Agencies (Australia)
http://www.naa.gov.au/recordkeeping/control/rkms/summary.htm

Visitors to this site may view online or download the recordkeeping metadata standard (Version 1.0, May 1999) developed by the National Archives of Australia for use in Commonwealth government agencies. The standard is comprised of twenty basic metadata elements (eight of which are mandatory) and sixty-five sub-elements.

ISO/IEC International Standard 11179
http://pueblo.lbl.gov/~olken/X3L8/index.html

The 11179 standard concerns data element specification and standardization. Although the standard is still under development, it is starting to be implemented by various organizations including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Environmental Data Registry at http://www.epa.gov/edr/).

TOOLS

TagGen (HiSoftware)
http://www.hisoftware.com/

HiSoftware's TagGen product allows the easy insertion and maintenance of metadata tags in web documents without disturbing other tags or page design. Of particular value to Minnesota state agencies is the Dublin Core edition, which is available free of charge to each through the Bridges Project ( http://bridges.state.mn.us/ ). Trial versions are available for free download from the HiSoftware site.

Nordic Metadata Project—Dublin Core Metadata Template
http://www.lub.lu.se/cgi-bin/nmdc.pl

As its name implies, this is a form, based upon the elements of the Dublin Core, into which the user enters text. Meta tags are generated and returned in either the HTML or HTML-4 formats. Tags must be cut and pasted into the target web document by the user.

UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking) DC-Dot
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/

This service retrieves user—specified web pages and generates HTML meta tags based upon the elements of the Dublin Core. The tool will also extract metadata from Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files. Tags can be converted into the following formats: USMARC, SOIF, IAFA/ROADS, TEI headers, GILS and RDF. As an additional utility, users can check the validity any Dublin Core web page metadata they may already have.

Reggie—The Metadata Editor
http://metadata.net/dstc/

The Reggie tool creates metadata using the HTML 3.2 standard, the HTML 4.0 standard, and the RDF (Resource Description Framework) format, with the results being e-mailed to the user. It can be used for the following metadata element sets and languages: Dublin Core, GILS, ANZLIC, AGLS, EdNA, IMS, GEM. The tool requires a familiarity with element set definitions, as well as the latest version of either the Netscape or Microsoft browser. The site is maintained by the Resource Discovery Unit of the Distributed Systems Technology Centre, which is supported by the Australian government.

SITES WITH MULTIPLE LINKS

Metadata Resources
http://www.ifla.org/II/metadata.htm

This site, sponsored by IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions), provides links to dozens of other sites related to metadata, as well as digital libraries.

OTHER

The Data Administration Newsletter (TDAN)
http://www.tdan.com/edatt1_tocf.htm

Robert Seiner maintains this online publication and updates it on a quarterly basis. Articles typically have a business spin to them, focusing on such issues as metadata management, data warehouses, repositories, and data modeling. Among the other services offered by the site are book reviews, conference lists, and vendor and product lists.

The Meta-Data and Data Management Information Page
http://www.llnl.gov/liv_comp/metadata/

Hosted by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers), this site offers information organized into a number of categories: conferences and projects, working groups, archives of the IEEE metadata listserv, bibliography, and other efforts. The last section offers links to standardization projects, journals, tools, and general metadata projects.

Introduction to Metadata: Pathways to Digital Information
http://www.getty.edu/research/institute/standards/intrometadata/index.html

This online publication is the work of the Getty Standards Program of the Getty Research Institute. Several authors contributed to the work which covers such topics as definitions of metadata, metadata and the World Wide Web, metadata mapping and interoperability, and crosswalks of metadata standards. A glossary and a list of acronym definitions are included.

Powered by Metadata
http://www.mnhs.org/preserve/records/poweredbymeta.html

Learn about the Powered by Metadata symbol and metadata standards used by Minnesota government.

January 02, 2003

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