Using Free and Open Source GIS to Automatically Create

Standards-Based Spatial Metadata in Academia

Claire Ellul, Nart Tamash, Feng Xian, John Stuiver, Patrick Rickles

DISCLAIMER

Metadata

Data about the data

Importance

Boring

Lots of Fields

Maintenance

Automation

Many Easily Done

Keywords and Language

Open Source Software

Metadata Spatial

Datasets

Tight Coupling (Triggers)

PostGIS 2.0 Database

PostreSQL / PostGIS Database (Nart Tamash)

QGIS Plug-in (Feng Xian)

Identifying Language (QGIS python Plug-in using the ‘langid’ library)

For metadata: concatenate TITLE,

ABSTRACT, LINEAGE

Pass the resulting text into the ‘langid’ code

Store result in the metadata table in the

database

For dataset: take the first 10,000 characters of text

Identifying Keywords (PL/pgSQL Trigger)

Identify Text Fields in the Data Set

Split any text into single words using the space character as delimiter

Create a single column list of all the words using

the SQL UNION query

Use an SQL GROUP BY query to identify the 10 most frequently used

words

Various Datasets

Different Countries

Results

Produced Metadata Dataset

Dataset Metadata Information

Common Words

Character Set

18 out of 20 Mandatory INSPIRE Fields

Metadata Language Successfully Detected

Mixed Results with Keywords and Dataset Language

Further Work

Multiplatform

Web Accessible

Understandable To All