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Can you achieve "metadata nirvana"?

By Anonymous
I joined Astun two and a half years ago and being a bit of a data geek (having led MapAction's Data Circle for a number of years pre-children), one of the things that attracted me to the position was Astun's track record in metadata and their solutions with the Environment Agency / Defra and the Scottish Government. What with the Geospatial Commission's excellent progress with Data Discoverability since their inception, this has become much more prominent of late.  We figured a webinar would be the best forum to showcase our learnings presented by our resident metadata expert, Jo Cook.

"Attaining Metadata Nirvana with GeoNetwork and GEMINI 2.3" was our first ever webinar and we were chuffed that over fifty people from nearly forty organisations attended and remained engaged throughout. (It's amazing what the organiser control panel in GoToWebinar shows you!) The agenda covered:
Guidance for editing a metadata record (GEMINI 2.3)

  1. What UK GEMINI 2.3 standards are.
  2. How they've changed from version 2.2.
  3. What GeoNetwork 3.8 looks like and it's new functionality.
  4. GEMINI 2.3 Plugin.
  5. Advice on implementation in your business or organisation.
Jo defined "Metadata Nirvana" as being the ability to create metadata for real business use quickly and easily. This takes us away from using metadata for Inspire compliance only, into a metadata strategy offering a wealth of business benefits that include:
  • Enabling better decision making through the use of appropriate data.
  • Supporting collaboration by simplifying access to data when needed.
  • Ensuring data transparency.
  • Breaking down of silos.

Front page of GeoNetwork 3.8
If you're interested in a cloud based managed system that provides an end-to-end user friendly solution to publish and store metadata records both internally and externally, to the general public and / or your customers, have a  look at us! We offer:
  • Cloud based system with no local implementation.
  • Fully managed enterprise solution.
  • Secure, resilient and scalable with performance monitoring.
  • Integrated with GIS platforms such as QGIS, ArcGIS and MapInfo.
  • Dashboard statistics and monitoring of linked services (WxS).
  • Version control, auditing and roll-back.
  • Automated updates and / or reminders
We firmly believe that to make the best use of it's data, an organisation needs to put in place appropriate, enterprise wide, data management. It is widely recognised that metadata is key to good data governance, as it ensures that users can find and use appropriate data and are aware of it's currency, quality and provenance - which is not limited to spatial data these days. We can also include non-spatial data in your metadata catalog, so all your information can be in one place, with a workflow for publishing this to data.gov.uk.

Adding in non-spatial data (Happy Christmas!)


If you missed the presentation, have a look at the recording on our YouTube channel. And please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments.

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