About CatMDEdit

CatMDEdit is a metadata editor tool that facilitates the documentation of resources, with special focus on the description of geographic information resources. It is an initiative of the National Geographic Institute of Spain (IGN), which is the result of the scientific and technical collaboration between IGN and the Advanced Information Systems Group (IAAA) of the University of Zaragoza with the technical support of GeoSpatiumLab (GSL).

The tool has been implemented in Java and has the following features:

• Multi-platform (Windows, Unix). As it has been developed in Java and the storage of metadata records is managed directly through the file system, the application can be deployed in any platform with the minimum requirement of having installed a Java virtual machine.

• Multilingual. The application has been developed following the Java internationalization methodology. Nowadays, there is a Spanish, English, French, German, Polish, Portuguese and Czech version. Contributors are welcome for customization to other languages.

• Definition and management of different metadata repositories (repositories may also contain data files), including the selection and filtering of metadata records stored in each local metadata repository.

• Metadata edition in conformance with "ISO 19115. Geographic Information - Metadata" standard (ISO 19115:2003/Cor 1 2006, ISO/TS 19139:2007 XML encoding). Edition interfaces adapted to different metadata profiles:

  • ISO 19115 comprehensive metadata model.

  • ISO 19115 Core metadata for geographic datasets.

  • NEM ("Núcleo Español de Metadatos") metadata profile (NEM v1.2). NEM is a recommendation defined by the Spanish National Geographical High Board ("Consejo Superior Geográfico"). This subset includes all the elements defined in the “ISO 19115 Core metadata for geographic datasets”.

  • INSPIRE implementing rules for metadata and their correspondence with the standard ISO 19115. This profile has been customized to meet the requirements set up in the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in the Community (INSPIRE).

  • WISE metadata profile. This profile has been customized to meet the guidelines for metadata in the implementation of the Water Framework Directive and the development of the “Water Information System for Europe” (WISE).

• Metadata edition in conformance with "ISO 19119. Geographic information - Services" standard (ISO 19119:2005). Edition interfaces adapted to different metadata profiles:

  • ISO 19115/19119 comprehensive metadata model.

  • NEM ("Núcleo Español de Metadatos") metadata profile for services (NEM-S v1.0). NEM is a recommendation defined by the Spanish National Geographical High Board ("Consejo Superior Geográfico").

  • INSPIRE implementing rules for metadata and their correspondence with the standard ISO 19115 and ISO 19119. This profile has been customized to meet the requirements set up in the Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in the Community (INSPIRE).

• Metadata edition in conformance with the Dublin Core metadata standard (ISO 15836). This tool follows the guidelines for expressing Dublin Core metadata using the Resource Description Framework.

• Customization of the tool to support new standards and metadata profiles according to user needs.

• Automatic metadata generation for some data file formats: Shapefile, DGN, ECW, FICC, GeoTiff, GIF/GFW, JPG/JGW, PNG/PGW.

• Automatic metadata generation for spatial series. CatMDEdit allows the automatic creation of metadata for collections of related resources, in particular spatial series arisen as a result of the fragmentation of geometric resources into datasets of manageable size and similar scale.

• Automatic metadata generation from the "getCapabilities" operation supported by a service that complies with the OGC Specifications (WMS, CSW, WFS, WCS or WPS).

• Exchange of metadata records according to different standards in XML and RDF:

  • XML format in compliance with the ISO19139 technical specification. (ISO 19115 metadata).

  • XML format in conformance with the standard CSDGM (Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata), defined by U.S. FGDC.

  • RDF format according to the encoding rules for Dublin Core in RDF.

  • XML format according to the SDIGER - Dublin Core Metadata Application Profile for geographical data mining.

  • XML format according to the XML-Schemas established in the OGC Catalogue Services Specification for the HTTP protocol binding (Catalogue Services for the Web, CSW).

  • MARC21 metadata standard (ISO 2709) Import and Export tool, with support to MARCXML , MARC21 2709 and labelled MARC21 formats

• Presentation of metadata records using different look&feels in HTML and Excel:

  • For CSDGM: FGDC HTML (es, en), FAQ HTML (en), Geography Network HTML (en), ESRI HTML (es, en).

  • For ISO 19115: HTML (es, en, fr, pl, pt), Excel (format used for both input and output files) and MIGRA (Spanish standard for geographic information exchange).

  • For Dublin Core: HTML (es, en, fr, pl, pt).

• Additional tools to facilitate the edition of metadata:

  • Contacts repository tool. It allows the reuse of contact information (e.g. name, address, telephone …) of organizations and individuals, which must be filled in several metadata elements. Thanks to this component, the contact information about a responsible party is inserted only once and used whenever it is required.

  • Thesaurus tool. It enables metadata creators to use thesauri in order to fill in some metadata elements. The use of controlled keywords facilitates the mapping between a selected vocabulary and a large collection of records.

  • On-line help about the metadata elements defined in a specific metadata profile: definitions, maximum occurrence, examples…. The user manual is also accessible on-line in PDF format.

  • Metadata validation according to the mandatory elements defined in each metadata profile and the INSPIRE and NEM recomendations by means of the new metadata validation service from Spanish SDI (IDEE).

  • Visualization of some data file formats such as Shapefile, ECW, GeoTiff, GIF, JPG, BMP, PDF, HTML, ...

  • Additional tools for the selection of bounding box coordinates: coordinate conversion between different coordinate reference systems, and graphic selection of coordinates over maps, allowing the user to add new maps to the selection.

  • Additional tools for the graphic selection of the geographic extent: polygon selection on a map.

  • Additional tools for the graphic location of the data: generation of RSS and geoRSS.

  • Integration of gvSig to show geographical data.

More details about CatMDEdit can be found in the following presentation. You can also have a look at this video for the integration with GIS tools.