About PASDA
Metadata Tools
The following is a basic overview of some of the freely available
tools that can be installed and used to maintain metadata in-house.
These are tools that the PASDA metadata staff has experience with
and can offer assistance in implementing. Use of all of these tools
require a more in-depth understanding of the metadata standard than
is required to use the PASDA metadata form. Additional hands-on
training can be scheduled for in-house maintenance of metadata.
Contact the PASDA Metadata Coordinator
for further information about these sessions.
Metadata Development Tools
-
ArcView Metadata Collector v. 2.0
From the NOAA Coastal Services Center this is a free ArcView Extension.
Versions are available for any OS that supports ArcView. Given projection
information the extension will extract information such as bounding
coordinates and attributes. It provides a form interfact to enter other
information. It can store metadata elements in .dbf or .txt files for
reuse with subsequent metadata records. Will output metadata in text
or html formats and also offers the option of generating an INFO file
that will become a part of that coverage.
-
cns and mp
Produced by Peter Schweitzer of the USGS under the support of the FGDC,
these two command line tools available for DOS and UNIX will take a plain
text produced by a text editor as input, validate it according to the
CSDGM and produce output in a variety of formats including, text, html,
sgml, dif and xml as well as an error report which is used to correct
elements in the metadata. The mp program is the metadata parser
that validates the metadata record and "passing through mp"
is often the term for complaint metadata that can be shared among many
metadata applications. PASDA staff use these tools as a part of the final
preparation of metadata files for inclusion in the PASDA site.
- Corpsmet95
Developed for the Army Corps of Engineers by Coastal Oceanographics, Inc.
This free tool for Windows 95 and NT is not vendor specific. It provides
an intuitive multiple pane interface to simplify metadata input. The
left-hand pane is a tree view of the metadata standard that can be expanded
to the relevant elements. Graphic symbols indicate elements that are
mandatory, mandatory if applicable, or optional. It also provides check
boxes and pick lists to simplify input. The program produces plain text
file output.
- Metamaker v. 2.30
From the USGS Biological Resources Division, Upper Midwest Environmental
Sciences Center the Metamaker database tool was produced to support the
National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII). It supports FGDC
CSDGM standard metadata as well as additional fields recording biological
related information as required by the NBII. This is a standalone
database based on Microsoft Access Version 2.0 for Windows 3.1. It is a
16 bit program that stores metadata elements in a relational database.
Output can be produced using cns & mp which are integrated into the program.
