Rob Walker The INSPIRE metadata regulations and quality issues – a user view Rob Walker Association for Geographic Information, London

Rob Walker The Association for Geographic Information (AGI) Umbrella organisation for GI in the UK Membership comprises corporate bodies in the public and private sectors and individuals from government departments and agencies, local authorities, national organisations, education institutions, utilities, software and service suppliers and data suppliers. Mission is to “maximise the use of geographic information for the benefit of the citizen, good governance and commerce”. Operate gigateway national geospatial metadata service. Working Group dealing with INSPIRE and producing AGI repsonses to consultations

Rob Walker INSPIRE metadata regulations Provide metadata for public sector data resources Set up geospatial metadata services to enable data resources to be discovered

Rob Walker INSPIRE metadata element groups 1.Identification 2.Classification of spatial data and services 3.Keyword 4.Geographic location 5.Temporal reference 6.Quality and validity 7.Conformity 8.Constraint related to access and use 9.Organisation responsible … 10.Metadata on metadata

Rob Walker Quality and validity Lineage –Statement on process history and/or overall quality of the spatial dataset –How to express overall quality? Spatial resolution – resolution distance (imagery, surveying, data capture), or – equivalent scale (only applicable to paper maps – meaningless for digital data)

Rob Walker Conformity Specification –Implementing Rule (thematic data specification) –Other specification to which the resource conforms Degree –Conformant / Not conformant / Not evaluated How to evaluate conformity? –What is conformity? –Who decides? –Degrees of non-conformity?

Rob Walker Discovery metadata services Internet based, not central database Range of portals Access to a range of metadata nodes Distributed services – portal constructs query and searches metadata nodes for matches Common architecture –User layer –INSPIRE geo-portal –Member States services and portals Issues of service protocols

Rob Walker General observations Retrospective collection of metadata is onerous – should be done at data creation, using automatic tools Key elements for searching are –topic category (classification of spatial data and services) –keyword (need controlled vocabulary) –geographic location (bounding box) –temporal reference (temporal extent)

Rob Walker Conclusions INSPIRE metadata regulations welcomed Necessitates review and cataloging of data resources Difficult to provide entries for some metadata elements - fuzziness Will need quality review of metadata Geospatial discovery metadata services to be set up Aim is to make resources “discoverable” Still issues of access and use constraints