Automation of Metadata Repository Development with XML Schema

Abstract

Metadata standards have been discussed since years in the environmental domain. Although the community has agreed that metadata are important for information finding, an globally accepted standard is still missing. Different requirements in diverse environmental application domains, countries and organisations have led to a huge variety on metadata vocabularies and technologies. Even projects using existing standards tend to adjust them slightly to their own requirements. A consequence is that new metadata repositories are developed or adapted to the new meta data element sets over and over again. In this paper we present a novel approach for the automation of metadata repository development. As input the system requires only an XML Schema describing the metadata vocabulary. Based on this schema the user interface, database schema and the search, retrieval and upload mechanism are generated during a batch process. The user interface layout can be further controlled by templates. The system is developed for the NOKIS project and evaluated by generating a metadata repository for an adjusted ISO 19115 metadata element set.