http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6373-4410
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ABSTRACT
With recent advances in remote sensing, location-based services and other related technologies, the production of geospatial information has exponentially increased in the last decades. Furthermore, to facilitate discovery and efficient access to such information, spatial data infrastructures were promoted and standardized, with a consideration that metadata are essential to describing data and services. Standardization bodies such as the International Organization for Standardization have defined well-known metadata models such as ISO 19115. However, current metadata assets exhibit heterogeneous quality levels because they are created by different producers with different perspectives. To address quality-related concerns, several initiatives attempted to define a common framework and test the suitability of metadata through automatic controls. Nevertheless, these controls are focused on interoperability by testing the format of metadata and a set of controlled elements. In this paper, we propose a methodology of testing the quality of metadata by considering aspects other than interoperability. The proposal adapts ISO 19157 to the metadata case and has been applied to a corpus of the Spanish Spatial Data Infrastructure. The results demonstrate that our quality check helps determine different types of errors for all metadata elements and can be almost completely automated to enhance the significance of metadata.
Acknowledgements
This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Government (project TIN2017-88002-R), the Regional Government of Aragon (Spain) and the European Social Fund (code T59_17R), and the Regional Government of Andalusia (Spain) for the financial support since 1997 to the research group (Ingeniería Cartográfica) with code PAIDI-TEP-164. The authors also wish to express their gratitude to National Center of Geographic Information (CNIG) of Spain for providing the corpus (dated on September 2nd 2016) used to test the methodology, and to the experts that contributed to the manual evaluation of some quality elements.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. http://anzlic.gov.au/sites/default/files/files/2015 Metadata Profile Guidelines Standard.pdf.
3. Some ISO 19157 elements are missing in this adaptation because they cannot be directly applied to metadata.
4. XML Schemas are available at http://schemas.opengis.net/csw/2.0.2/profiles/apiso/1.0.0/apiso.xsd.
8. The analysis of valid bounding boxes is analyzed as part of the domain consistency.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Manuel Antonio Ureña-Cámara
Manuel Antonio Ureña-Cámara is Associate Professor at the University of Jaén (Spain). He obtained his PhD in Geodesy and Cartographic Engineering in 2004 and a BSc in Computer Sciences. He is member of the “Ingeniería Cartográfica” Research Group and his research lies on GIS, metadata, data modelling, quality control, generalization and digital photogrammetry.
Javier Nogueras-Iso
Javier Nogueras-Iso holds MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Zaragoza (Spain). After working for the Economic and Social Committee of the European Communities (Brussels) in 1998, he started his research at the Advanced Information Systems Laboratory of the University of Zaragoza. Currently, he is Associate Professor of Computer Science at that University. He completed in 2005 a postdoctoral stay at the Joint Research Centre (Institute of Environment and Sustainability, Italy). Between 2011 and 2017 he has been Director of Catedra Logisman on ‘Technological Document Management’, and in November 2015 he was named Associate Director of the Aragon Institute of Engineering Research (I3A). His research interests are focused on Information Retrieval and Semantic Web technologies applied to different domains, although with a special emphasis on Geographic Information Infrastructures.
Javier Lacasta
Javier Lacasta holds a PhD in Computer Science since 2009, and he currently works as tenured Assistant Professor at the Computer Science and Systems Engineering Department of the University of Zaragoza (Spain). His research work is focused in the field of Knowledge Management applied to Spatial Data, semantic web, information retrieval and data mining. Along the last years, he has co-authored numerous publications in books, journals or conference proceedings. He has also collaborated in several R+D projects in this field.
Francisco Javier Ariza-López
Francisco Javier Ariza-López is Engineer (1991), and obtained his PhD from the University of Córdoba (1994). Since 1989 his research has been devoted to working with spatial data. His expertise is in spatial data and data quality. He belongs to several standardization committees and has developed some standards on spatial data quality. Apart from being Professor at the University of Jaén (Spain), he is currently the director of the Master’s Degree of Science in Quality Assessment and Management of Geographical Information. He has numerous scientific publications in the field of spatial data and several manuals dedicated to the quality of spatial data. He has directed numerous doctoral theses and is an international consultant with a broad experience.