April 2, 2015
In August 2014, the San Diego Regional GIS Council (SDRGC) Metadata Working Group established a set of minimum required metadata elements based on the ISO 19139 standard. SanGIS adopted the standard at the time it was published. Over the next few months SanGIS staff worked on updating metadata for all SanGIS maintained layers to meet the minimum requirements. The metadata update project was completed in December 2014 and the new metadata was published with the regular monthly updates the first week of January 2015.
ESRI’s ArcGIS software (the GIS software used by SanGIS) provides a number of standard formats to display and publish metadata. SanGIS has been using the ESRI ISO 19139 style sheet to create the metadata PDF documents. While this style sheet is thorough and complete and displays all metadata available for the layer, it can be overwhelming for researchers to find the most relevant information efficiently. For the past few months the SDRGC Metadata Working Group has been working to create a new style sheet that provides the minimum required metadata elements in a more simplified format. The new format (style sheet) displays the minimum required metadata elements as established by SDRGC in an easy-to-scan format.
The new metadata publication style sheet has now been adopted and SanGIS is working to convert all metadata PDF documents to the new format. This process will take a number of weeks to complete for the more than 300 layers in the regional data warehouse. We hope that the new format will provide a much more convenient method to review the layer description, dates covered, and dates published as well as complete information on attribute definitions.
For more information on the Regional Minimum Metadata Requirements see the documents on the SanGIS website under the Documents\Polices & Procedures page or on the SDRGC Documents page.
If you have any questions about the SanGIS maintained metadata, or you find corrections that should be made, please contact SanGIS at 858-874-7000 or send email to webmaster@sangis.org