Abstract
With the increased use of geospatial datasets across heterogeneous user groups and domains, assessing fitness-for-use is emerging as an essential task. Users are presented with an increasing choice of data from various portals, repositories, and clearinghouses. Consequently, comparing the quality and evaluating fitness-for-use of different datasets presents major challenges for spatial data users. While standardization efforts have significantly improved metadata interoperability, the increasing choice of metadata standards and their focus on data production rather than potential data use and application, renders typical metadata documents insufficient for effectively communicating fitness-for-use. Thus, research has focused on the challenge of communicating fitness-for-use of geospatial data, proposing a more “user-centric” approach to geospatial metadata. We present the Geospatial User-Centric Metadata ontology (GUCM) for communicating fitness-for-use of spatial datasets to users in the spatial and other domains, to enable them to make informed data source selection decisions. GUCM enables metadata description for various components of a dataset in the context of different application domains. It captures producer-supplied and user-described metadata in structured format using concepts from domain-independent ontologies. This facilitates interoperability between spatial and nonspatial metadata on open data platforms and provides the means for searching/discovering spatial data based on user-specified quality and fitness-for-use criteria.
Highlights
The quality of geospatial data has been the subject of extensive research in the GIS community for more than thirty years [1]
We introduce the Geospatial User-Centric Metadata (GUCM) ontology, which captures and represents metadata and fitness-for-use descriptions of geospatial data sources within various applications and domains, using machine-processable concepts defined in widely adopted ontologies
The Geospatial User-Centric Metadata ontology (GUCM) presented in this paper aims to bridge the gap between producer and user views on geospatial data quality and fitness-for-use
Summary
The quality of geospatial data has been the subject of extensive research in the GIS community for more than thirty years [1]. It has drawn considerable attention from the academic community and government agencies and, more recently, from industry. Spatial data supply chains today push data to the users via spatial Web portals or Web services. The value of this information depends on the ability to anticipate users’ needs and quality requirements. The value of spatial data products is realized when the delivered knowledge enables users to achieve their intended purposes [4]
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