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Metadata Standards

Datasets published to EGIS must have a complete metadata record. The TBS Standard on Geospatial Data requires that ISO19115, or the North American Profile (NAP) of ISO19115 be applied. Further, the Government of Canada has specified a Harmonized North American Profile (HNAP) which further specifies the mandatory metadata elements in NAP, mainly covering:

  • Bilingualism where one bilingual metadata record is required per dataset.

  • Controlled vocabularies, such as code lists, keywords from government of Canada core subject thesaurus and organization title from the Registry of Applied Titles.

  • Business rules, such as for the organization name, the online resource linkage and description for web services.1

FGP provides guidance on preparing metadata for both manual ingestion (using the FGP metadata tools), or automatically from an XML file that conforms to the HNAP standard.

Currently, FGP has in their development backlog an item to provide compartmentalized access to the FGP metadata catalog for government departments. We believe that this is intended so that individual government departments (e.g. Transport Canada) could publish metadata to the FGP catalog without publishing the actual data to FGP. Conceptually, this would mean a single metadata catalog could provide metadata services to a number of enterprise GIS systems across the Government of Canada. It's conceivable that, when Transport Canada wishes to publish a dataset to FGP, that a flag could be set in the FGP metadata catalog to provide access to the metadata record to the broader FGP user base at the same time.

EGIS should adopt the HNAP metadata standard, for the following reasons:

  • it's complies with the TBS Standard on Geospatial Data;

  • it is the standard used by FGP, and should allow for an easier integration with FGP's metadata catalog when/if that occurs

  • NAP is supported by ArcGIS Enterprise2

Metadata Process

The particular metadata process that a data publisher will use depends on the availability of metadata with the source dataset.

Scenarios

1. No Existing Metadata

In some cases, no metadata record will accompany the source dataset. In those cases, the quality of the source dataset should be given extra scrutiny. If there is no accompanying metadata record in place, it may mean that there is also not an adequate governance process for the dataset. If the data publisher, supported by the data governance team, is satisfied that there is appropriate governance in place, then the metadata record must be created before the dataset is published to EGIS.

2. Existing Metadata, Non-ArcGIS Format

Metadata may come in other formats, and must be converted into ArcGIS format. ArcGIS supports directly importing some other formats of metadata. Otherwise, the existing data must be transformed either automatically (using XSLT) into the ArcGIS format and imported into ArcGIS, or entered manually into ArcGIS.

3. Existing Metadata, ArcGIS Format

This set will include well-governed datasets currently in an Esri file or service format.

Managing EGIS Metadata in ArcGIS

1. Set Metadata Standard in ArcGIS Pro

  1. In ArcGIS Pro, click the Project tab.

  2. Click Options.

  3. In the Options window, click the Metadata item, and choose **North American Profile of ISO19115 2003 from the dropdown list.

  4. Click OK.

  5. Click the back arrow to close the Project tab.

2. Import Metadata in ArcGIS Pro

3. Edit and Validate Metadata in ArcGIS Pro

  1. In ArcGIS Pro, in the Catalog pane or in Catalog View, right-click the dataset and click Edit Metadata.

  2. Use the metadata view to edit the item's metadata. The ArcGIS Pro help provides documentation on creating NAP metadata . FGP provides additional guidance on creating HNAP-compliant metadata .

4. Edit and Validate Metadata in ArcGIS Enterprise

1 Source: HNAP metadata standard. https://gcgeo.gc.ca/en/hnapMetadata.html
2 We will need to investigate whether ArcGIS Enterprise can fully support HNAP and, if so, how. For example, can we implement full support in ArcGIS Enterprise by providing a custom stylesheet? Will we have to transform metadata records using XSLT?

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