Consortial Geospatial Data Collection: Toward Standards and Processes for Shared GeoBlacklight Metadata

Abstract

Consortial geospatial data communities, such as the OpenGeo-Portal federation and the GeoBlacklight initiative, facilitate contextualized discovery and promote metadata sharing to disperse hosting and preservation responsibilities across institutions. However, the challenges of communal metadata are manifold; they include proliferating standards, varying levels of completeness, mutable technology infrastructures, and uneven availability of human labor. Drawing from literature on metadata quality control, we outline a procedure for "scoring" GeoBlacklight records to establish a Domain Specific Language for metadata best practices. We propose strategies for authorship and management conducive to functionally interoperable geospatial metadata, that is versioned and enhanceable by the collective.

The trajectory of linked data in late capitalism

“…As is well known, despite the existence of metadata standards, there are a plethora of variants on how they are used even within a single institution which creates significant challenges to reuse (Dushay and Hillman, 2003). Further, the tools which create the data, even when adopting a common standard, can lead to large degrees of variance between instances of data (Battista et al, 2017). When assessing the problem of interoperability from the framework of late capitalism, we can see the desire for greater interoperability at least partially boils down to a question of hegemonic control.…”