Geospatial Metadata - History

History

The growing appreciation of the value of geospatial metadata through the 1980s and 1990s led to the development of a number of initiatives to collect metadata according to a variety of formats either within agencies, communities of practice, or countries/groups of countries. For example, NASA's "DIF" metadata format was developed during an Earth Science and Applications Data Systems Workshop in 1987, and formally approved for adoption in 1988. Similarly, the U.S. FGDC developed its geospatial metadata standard over the period 1992-1994. The Spatial Information Council of Australia and New Zealand (ANZLIC), a combined body representing spatial data interests in Australia and New Zealand, released version 1 of its "metadata guidelines" in 1996. ISO/TC 211 undertook the task of harmonizing the range of formal and de facto standards over the approximate period 1999-2002, resulting in the release of ISO 19115 "Geographic Information - Metadata" in 2003. As of 2011 individual countries, communities of practice, agencies, etc. have started re-casting their previously-used metadata standards as "profiles" or recommended subsets of ISO 19115, optionally with the inclusion of additional metadata elements as formal extensions to the ISO standard. The growth in popularity of Internet technologies and data formats, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), during the 1990s led to the development of mechanisms for exchanging geographic metadata on the Web. In 2004, the Open Geospatial Consortium released the current version (3.1) of Geography Markup Language (GML), an XML grammar for expressing geospatial features and corresponding metadata. With the growth of the Semantic Web in the 2000s, the geospatial community has begun to develop ontologies for representing semantic geospatial metadata. Some examples include the Hydrology and Administrative ontologies developed by the Ordnance Survey in the United Kingdom.