Die Bedeutung von Metadaten und Metadateninformationssystemen für die Geodatenwelt
Abstract
Metadata and metadata information systems in the area of geographic information play a significant role in the development of the market for geodata. Metadata themselves are a formal description of the geodata. They describe the spatial extend, accuracy, topicality, format, content and several other criteria that are necessary to evaluate the use of a dataset for a special task. Metadata information systems utilitize a set of tools to work with the metadata, evaluate whether they fit the needs of an individual task and compare the metadata to each other. These systems can be used on the one hand by providers of geodata as a new channel of distributing geodata; on the other hand it accelerates and eases the search for adequate geodata be the users. Going for this goal requires the consideration of established international standards for the formal description of the geodata. One of such standards is ISO 19115. Using common such standard enables the comparison of the metadata and interoperability between different areas of application. This article describes the use and concept of metadata, what they are used for and their value for development of transparency at the market for geodata. The InGeo Information Center and the GeoMIS.Bund are introduced as examples for metadata information systems.
