Data and metadata management automation for an effective approach to sharing environmental data

Abstract

In the market of geospatial systems there are several applications that handle data. Some of these components are oriented towards managing and storing data, map visualizations, and data streams, while other components are oriented towards data description and the creation of metadata. Neither of these applications offers users an overview of the process leading to the data creation up to its export to the end user. In the existing literature there are attempts to automate metadating - the term given to descriptions of data. Some companies are also trying an approach that allows, by means of workflow systems, the automation of the creation of a geospatial dataset. As a result, users of geospatial data are increasingly looking for a more structured process of managing geospatial data and metadata, and any tool that handles this process is likely to find reasonable success within this community. Public entities, mainly local ones, are often called on to deal with regulations that require web systems that reveal parameters of any given territory to users/citizens. Likewise, research organizations, especially those dealing with the environment, increasingly find themselves analyzing spatial data. Difficulties that arise when handling such data can be overcome using the approach we are proposing, which involves using a single tool that handles all the necessary steps in exporting spatial data. In this paper we present several methodologies used to manage geospatial data and metadata by means of GeoInt, a middleware tool developed at CNR-IIA that manages geospatial data produced in different research projects. GeoInt is a middleware program offering basic services that permit users to define both data and metadata. It allows users to manage map servers, and allows them to control the download and sharing processes. This research illustrates the ways in which GeoInt has been improved to minimize metadata editing by its users.