Standards & Metadata, Part VIII

My previous post on this topic stated how careful documentation and appropriate metadata high-grades any information that is shared online by giving origin, context and other information. It helps build bridges and I quipped a well-known tear down this wall that also closed my second last post on free data and apps.

In that post I described how UK Parish data underpinning my geo-history project came from publicly released Ordnance Survey Boundary Line data. I attributed the data in both figures of that post. And giscloud.com also adds a data source to each webmap, as in the middle map here.  Now Mapcentia, whose service is used to post that project, also added a metadata button next to each Table of Contents item, as entered in GeoCloud2 database - and to repeat them, see how it works on my map (thanks for the referral).

So to recap, in increasing levels of complexity and power, metadata are:

• attribution (required by most public sources)
• actual source of the data (web link, author, date)
• description of the data (as it pertains to the topic)
• full metadata servers (as for ex. gptogc.esri.com) 

Or read more about it here:

Better Metadata for GIS from Andrew Zolnai