Introduction
In January 2003, the JISC requested an
exit strategy for the Go-Geo! portal project. While
the JISC JCIE agreed to fund further development of
the portal, creation of content, in this case metadata,
is not an activity normally funded by JCIE. Access to
metadata describing geo-spatial data is central to the
purpose of the Go-Geo! portal. However, most geo-spatial
data within the UK academic community are not currently
recorded in any formal way, either for the purposes
of resource discovery or preservation/archiving (this
reflects in large part the fact that researchers do
not take data management seriously). As a consequence,
there is no readily available source of metadata with
which to ‘populate’ the portal. A need has been indentified
to encourage geo-spatial data creators/providers to
provide quality metadata as part of their data management
activities. This needs to be done sooner rather than
later as more and more data are being collected or created.
A change in culture is required as much as standards,
tools and procedures for creating and publishing metadata.
This is a challenge and one that should be considered
as a project in its own right with its own funding.
UK academia is not alone in this challenge. While many
UK government, business and research groups have recognised
the importance of geo-spatial metadata, it is widely
acknowledged that the task of creating and keeping metadata
current is time consuming and not one that is done by
preference. To overcome this, these organisations have
had to commit the necessary resources to support metadata
provision and creation. A national initiative, the UK
National Geographic Data Framework Gateway, has been
tasked with coordinating this activity.
Academics require encouragement to provide
quality metadata along with the means to easily create
and import these metadata into a service like Go-Geo!.
This initiative proposes a programme of work to encourage
the production of metadata. It makes recommendations
regarding the need to encourage the formal collection
of metadata about existing resources. It does not consider
the mechanisms for making that material available or
the storage of the material. These issues are addressed
in an accompanying proposal relating to the Go-Geo!
portal.
The intiaitve will run for one years duration. A member
of staff will be employed who has responsibility for
co-ordinating metadata collection and quality assurance
of metadata records. Their goal will be to encourage
the development of a culture amongst those working with
geographic data in UK academia so that production of
metadata becomes second nature to researchers and academics.
Once this culture is in place, which we estimate will
take about 2 years, it becomes possible to look to automatic
mechanisms for collecting geo-spatial metadata. A study
to investigate what these mechanisms might be forms
one of the work packages in the accompanying Go-Geo!
project plan.
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