Metadatenkatalog als zentraler Informationsvermittler für Geoinformationsressourcen

Abstract

Recently, large organisations, private or public, such as the City of Cologne, have been placing more and more emphasis on distributed information management. This comprises the provision of query tools, presentation tools and tools to capture information which is pertinent for the employees to perform specific tasks. The focus of the information management system of the City of Cologne is on geographical information resources (i.e. resources which have a reference to a location) including geo-data, geo-documents and geo-services. To facilitate the management of large holdings metadata systems have proven very beneficial in the context of digital libraries. This holds also for holdings which contain mainly geographical information resources. Against this background this paper deals with a metadata system which has been developed for managing, searching for and retrieving particularly geographical information resources. The system differentiates between an authoring and an retrieval component. Either component provides functionality which is tailored to meet specific requirements of geographical information resources. In addition to the conceptual design, the fully operative prototype and the lessons learned in the course of developing the system are presented.