Australasian geospatial metadata, standards, spaghetti and disappearing spacecraft
I’ve just been to the ANZLIC metadata presentation held by Land Information New Zealand (LINZ).
ANZLIC is the Australia & New Zealand Spatial Information Council. They provide leadership in the collection, management and use of spatial information in Australasia.In Australia they are working on the standards for a national address register, including standards, schema etc, but stop short of the implementation.
They are associated with, but independent from The [Australian] Office of Spatial Data Management facilitates and coordinates spatial data management across Australian Government Agencies.
ANZLIC is working on a range of initiatives, including ANZsi, a spatial marketplace, similar to GeoConnections in Canada. This will provide a marketplace for all spatial resources in Australasia. It will include integration with and to existing supply side infrastructre and initiatives, and anticipates demand side involvement.
They believe that spatial data use is becoming an everyday thing, involving off the shelf technology, increased user knowledge (due to Google Maps, Google Earth etc), and driven in part because at least 80% of government transactions have a ‘where’ component. They challenged us to think of what fell into the 20%, and the audience couldn’t come up with any government transactions that don’t have a spatial component.
ACIL Tasman did a study which estimated that inefficient access to data reduces the direct productivity of some sectors by between 5-15%. (Summary of findings here). ANZLIC sees metadata as an important solution to this problem.
They used the metaphor of a can of spaghetti to explain what metadata is. The can’s label includes a title (product name), an abstract (product description), a statement of quality (99% fat free, no artificial preservatives or colours), instructions on use (heating/cooking directions), a detailed list of fields in the data (the ingredients), and the extent of the data (weight, nutritional information). They also illustrated the importance of the use of standards with this story “Two Teams, Two Measures Equaled One Lost Spacecraft“.
ANZMET Lite is a tool that has been developed by the OSDM, with the help of the jurisdictions. Its target user groups are organisations with up to 30 resources requiring metadata records to be published, contractors who are collecting resources on behalf of clients, and are required to provide metadata records. It allows for the production of linked (connected to the resource) or unlinked metadata records. It also allows for parent/child relationships between metadata. There are a number of classes in the parent/child hierarchy, including dataset, service, model, tile, document, and many others.
There is also the ANZLIC metadata profile, and the profile guidelines, which include a mapping between AGLS / NZGLS and the ANZLIC Metadata Profile.
The tool is pseudo opensource, in that its origins were in the Australian Defence Force, who won’t let it be fully opensourced. You can however get the source code, and modify it, as long as you notify OSDM of the changes, and provide them back.
LINZ is working with MoRST to create a GeoNetwork node for NZ. In the meantime metadata created using ANZMet Lite can be emailed to nzgo@linz.govt.nz for external publishing. More information on NZ Geospatial Office activity at www.geospatial.govt.nz.