ICSM ISO19115-1 Metadata for Services Best Practices

This document was compiled by OpenWork Ltd (OWL) on behalf of and with guidance and contributions from the ICSM Metadata Working Group (MDWG). The purpose of this document is to capture the consensus best practice guidance for the use of recommended ISO 19115-1 metadata elements for organisations in the Australia / New Zealand region when documenting geospatial service. Further, this guide will aid the migration from the retired ANZLIC Metadata Profile of ISO 19115:2003 to the currently endorsed ISO 191115-1:2014 (including Amd.1:2018).

This guidance is a point in time best practice guide and will be updated as requirement and capabilities evolve. This will be done in a structure version fashion. It is anticipated that new versions of this guidance will be released annually as a PDF document. Incremental changes, managed by the MDWG Technical group in biweekly meetings, will be versioned in a GitHub repository and reflected in the web pages view of this document.

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Acknowledgements

ICSM Metadata Working Group

• Chair : Irina Bastrakova
• Secretariat: Graham Logan
• ICSM Chair: Simon Costello
• ICSM Executive Officer: Lesley Waterhouse

Contributors

• Lead Author: Byron Cochrane - OpenWork Ltd
• Irina Bastrakova - Geoscience Australia
• Jenny Mahuika - Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN)
• Evert Bleys - ISO TC211
• Melanie Barlow - Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC)
• Aaron Sedgmen - Geoscience Australia

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Outstanding Issues

Some issues remain unresolved and without clear consensus in the MDWG. Most of these are element specific and are discussed under those individual elements. But some are broader.

How to Best Capture Link to Service Resource

Core to any metadata record is access to the described resource. The ISO 19115-1 standard provides somewhat different advice for data and services resources about how to best capture linkage to the resource described by a metadata record (as opposed to linkages to the metadata). There are several options where service linkage may be expressed in an ISO19115-1 metadata record. The MDWG has not agreed to a consistent approach. Inside the resource citation package, the identifier and onlineResource may both provide this functionality. The package DistributionInfo is, of course, a common way to capture such information - particularly for data resources, but is perhaps a less logical place when describing service resources. For service resources.ContainsOperations is another common location for resource access information. Further discussion and guidance are needed to resolve this issue to support machine readability and reduce confusion.

Link to Tightly Coupled Data

There are numerous ways the related data resource may be captured in a service metadata record (e.g. operatesOn, operatedDataset, or even a sibling MD_DataIdentification package. The choice of coupledResource is made for the following reasons. ISO 19115-1 recommends coupledResource as minimum metadata required for the discovery of service resources. The options operatesOn, SV_CoupledResource.resource and a sibling identificationInfo/MD_DataIdentification all require a MD_Identifier package. This would create metadata records that identify more than one resource. ICSM guidance is that such a situation be avoided as it could confuse other catalogues that expect a one-to-one relationship between metadata resources and resources. It has been resolved that it will be best practice to use CoupledResource>ResourceReference>onlineResource>Linkage to hold linkage to metadata for tightly coupled resources.

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Metadata required for the discovery of service resources

As described in ISO 19115-1 Table F.2

The guidance produced here is meant to be a flexible resource. The element discussions are stored as separate files in a git repository and as such can be incorporated into web documents as needed for a particular purpose. They also may be cloned or forked from the GitHub repository at https://github.com/icsm-au/metadata-working-group and modified for a particular communities purpose.

Below is an example of how one might use a particular collection of best practice guidance documents to support a particular purpose. In this case, is a list of elements as described in ISO 19115-1 Table F.2 of the minimum metadata required for the discovery of service resources

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