Sharing ISO 19115 Metadata in NOKIS – Experiences, Features, Perspectives

Abstract

NOKIS (North See and Baltic See Coastal Information System) main objective is to establish a metadata information system for the German North Sea and Baltic Sea coastal regions. Starting back in January 2001 it was one of the first metadata systems using an extended element set of ISO 19115. It became so far one of the most advanced suites for the Web-based management of large-scale environmental metadata. With this paper we would like to participate in the lively discussion about the use and the usefulness of ISO 19115 in the environmental domain by sharing our experiences. In addition we would like to present and discuss the newest features of the system, which we believe are interesting for most future metadata applications. First to mention a service for the transformation of geographic coordinates into different coordinate system. Secondly, our new extensible query mechanism which provides simple user interface to a flexible construction of complex queries. Finally, we will discuss our solution for relational Persistence for XML-based Metadata.