Establishing a Standard Metadata Web Portal to Support Discovery of Spatial Data in State Organizations

Abstract

At present, Spatial data sets are collected by a number of government organizations in isolation and only serving individual organizations’ purposes but not for considering the expectations and requirements of other stakeholders. These data sets are managed in closed systems and this has created a large information stack. As a result, these data systems collected by organizations cannot be accessed by other organizations. Also, It is difficult to understand what information is available and where it is stored etc. This has led to repetitions and several organizations collecting the same information because they are unaware of the types of information that already exist. Manual data sharing procedures contribute to delay in sharing, and the effort required to manually integrate updates from one agency to another is labour intensive and time consuming. General public should be able to access geographic information required in government institutions. Therefore, it was decided to develop a common platform to share geospatial information. When considering about metadata, there are a number of standards to maintain metadata. It was very difficult to compare metadata due to lack of having standards,. Hence research was carried out to understand already available data and metadata. International standards such as ISO19115, FGDC standard, ISOTC etc were examined. For research purpose Survey Department, Disaster management and LUPPD and RDA data was collected and compared with ISO standards. Standard metadata web portal was developed to produce as a solution to this problem. It was designed based on the management and administrative requirements of selected government organizations. Most of the time, the system produced maximum support to the user. The developed Standard metadata web portal has the ability to upload datasets of different organizations, define mapping based on ISO classification for uploaded datasets and for the department data sets. The system provides facility to manage users and verify uploaded datasets with the ISO classification. This also provides strategies to view core metadata records, detailed view and provides comparison of mapped data with the original dataset This Centralized standard metadata web portal has been developed using some modern open sourced tools and software. PHP, which is a powerful server side scripting language, has been used for server side scripting along with the Apache web server and PostgreSQL which is an object relational database management system with an emphasis on extensibility and standards compliance