2.1 Collect and Publish metadata

An embedded approach to maintain metadata

Paul van Genuchten

2023-05-09

Organisations organise their data in file repositories or databases

File hierarchy

A readme in each folder

• Add a readme to describe the resources in a folder
• Why not structure the content in the readme, so also machines can read it?

Metadata Control File

• A convention of the pygeometa community (Meteo Canada)
• YAML, easy to read by humans and machines
• A subset of the ISO19115 standard for metadata

MCF

pygeometa library

• a library to work with MCF
• exports MCF to various metadata models (iso, dcat, stac)
• https://github.com/geopython/pygeometa

The geodatacrawler tool

• Developed at ISRIC in the last year
• On the shoulders of giants; GDAL, pygeometa, pandas
• Generates MCF files for a file repository
• Imports metadata from external sources
• Extracts MCF files from a repository to load it into a catalogue
• Creates map services configuration for files in the repository

pycsw catalogue

• A catalogue implementation in python
• Limited funtionality, easy maintenance
• Wide range of supported catalogue standards, serves many communities
• Database backend
• Skin customisable with jinja templates