OpenGeoMetadata Initiative

[Jack Reed]

Geospatial Community,

I wanted to share an exciting new collaborative initiative to better share geospatial metadata, OpenGeoMetadata. This effort came out of ongoing work by the OpenGeoportal Metadata Working Group and a meeting two weeks ago hosted by New York Public Libraries. Already, more than +3600 GIS data and historic map metadata layers are being shared in the collaborative effort.

OpenGeoMetadata aims to provide a coherent way for organizations to share and collaborate on geospatial metadata using the Github platform. Rather than implement new services for each institution or a common highly available shared infrastructure, we can go ahead and start sharing this metadata using Github as the platform. We envision federated metadata search and discovery platforms (e.g. OpenGeoportal, GeoBlacklight) being easily able to take advantage of this service. We have already started to experiment with lightweight metadata conversion services utilizing this infrastructure and are pleased with initial results.

I wanted to take this opportunity to invite you and your institution to participate in this effort. You can participate in several ways!

1.) Comment and contribute on proposed organization structure. https://github.com/OpenGeoMetadata/metadatarepository/pull/9

This pull request summarizes the conversation already being taken place in the issues, and addresses the basic infrastructure of the organization/repository. A reader-friendly version is here: https://github.com/OpenGeoMetadata/metadatarepository/blob/update-readme/README.md

2.) Contribute your metadata!

If your institution doesn’t already have a member added to the Github repository, please add a comment to this issue: https://github.com/OpenGeoMetadata/metadatarepository/issues/8 and we will add you.

3.) Add an issue for comments, proposals, and questions here: https://github.com/OpenGeoMetadata/metadatarepository/issues

Best,

Jack Reed
Geospatial Web Engineer
pjr...@stanford.edu
@mejackreed
(650)454-7398
Digital Library Systems and Services
Stanford, CA 94305