more on better metadata

Dear EGIP:

As you now know, Inspire may be just around the corner (June 6)...maybe or maybe not, in the form you like, or not. In any case, it is time to push R+D efforts in the key areas of metadata, services, data harmonization....or else what will end up drafted into the implementation rules will be last decades' status quo.

On the metadata front much can and should be done. I posit that SDIs are not, as some suggest, just like digital libraries, but rather networked services for accessing and processing combinable (fusionable) objects (features). Books may now become digital but they are not (yet) combinable, generalizable, abstractable, etc.

Bottom line: geodata are in the end objects, not files, mapsheets, etc. Therefore, let us start properly exploiting OO technology and leave the text file world behind.

Here are some initial thoughts on ways forward in (geo) metadata.

http://www.geoconnexion.com/magazine/article.asp?ID=2253

cheers,
Mike Gould

EGIP Archive: http://www.ec-gis.org/egip/ Received on Mon May 30 10:52:58 2005