*-2mm Among the many GIS standards that provide interoperability of (geo)spatial data and related web services, we can identify a limited but important group of standards, intended to catalog spatial data sets and services. Many of currently used standards are based on international ISO 19115 series and their national profiles. Among them are two Russian national standards developed by the Technical Committee (TC) 394 Geographic information/Geomatics of the Federal Agency on Technical Regulating and Metrology (Rosstandart): the GOST R 57668-2017 “Spatial data. Metadata. Part 1. Fundamentals” and the GOST R 57656-2017 “Spatial data. Metadata. Part 2. Extensions for imagery and gridded data”. The analysis of Russian, foreign and international geoportals with metadata editing, validation and publishing functions has been carried out, including using ISO 19115, FGDC-STD-001-001-1998, DIF, Dublin Core and open source software GeoNode, GeoNetwork, GeoServer, etc. The results of the analysis can be useful in selecting efective spatial metadata management systems in the scientific geoportals.
international standards for the content of spatial metadata, including the creation of inventory mechanisms and efective search for data and services on their geographic metadata as the primary function of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) and access to them [3].
The problem is particularly urgent in the context of Russia’s transition to the digital
economy [
Interest in similar establishment in Russia emerged towards the end of the last century, when in
1998 non-profit Russian GIS Association in its Information Bulletin has organized a wide public
discussion of the draft Russian content standard of metadata of electronic maps, developed by
the TC 051 of Rosstandart. Text of this draft drew a lot of criticism, both in its substance and in
view of the fact that it has completely ignored the experience of developing de facto international
standard FGDC-STD-001-1998 [
The internationally recognized ISO standard 19115:2003 Geographical Information — Metadata was developed by ISO/TC 211 Geographic Information/Geomatics and published in 2003. It fully complied with the European standard EN ISO 19115:2005 produced by Technical Committee CEN/NC 278 Geographic information. Following it, TC 394 has developed its Russian profile, the GOST R 52573-2006 “Geographic Information. Metadata”. Later there appeared a standard for its implementation in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) — ISO 19139:2007 Geographic information — Metadata — XML schema implementation.
This standard is long since out of date, splitting into two separate ones: the ISO 191151:2014 Geographic information — Metadata — Part 1: Fundamentals, successive to basic content of ISO 19115:2003, and the ISO 19115-2:2009 Geographic information — Metadata — Part 2: Extensions for imagery and gridded data. The latter allows you to most efectively describe the spatial data sets presented in raster formats, such as remote sensing data, and similar (but not identical to them) data ordered in regular grids, such as grid-based digital elevation models. They correspond to the already mentioned GOST R 57668-2017 and GOST R 57656-2017. National Standardization Program for year of 2020 set out the development of two standards similar to ISO 19115-2:2019 Geographic information — Metadata — Part 2: Extensions for acquisition and processing, what included a revision of the GOST R 57656-2017, and the GOST R standard based on ISO 19119:2016 Geographic Information — Services. 3. Domestic experience More than twenty years of experience in the creation and operation of geoportals and similar network services ofers diferent approaches to metadata management. It is presented in numerous scientific publications, manuals, regulatory and technical documentation, in the multiple “best practice” analyses. The chart (see Table below) contains selected examples of network services with a brief description of the features of editing, validation, and displaying of spatial metadata.
Let’s start with the analysis of domestic, relatively modest, experience.
Among the current geoportals, the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology in the Far East
Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (FEB RAS) is the first to mention. It is organized
on the fairly popular and functional GeoNetwork platform, as well as another service by
the Pacific Institute of Geography FEB RAS, it is a part of the stack of software products
with open source OSGeo software (http://www.osgeo.org) known in dozens of its applications
abroad (https://geonetwork-opensource.org). The platform maintains ISO 19115/ISO 19139
and metadata elements of ISO 15836:2009 Information and documentation — The Dublin Core
metadata element set, providing metadata editing. Its operational integration of volcanological
data has been repeatedly discussed in the scientific periodicals [
Another “long-lived” service supporting the ISO 19115 metadata description is organized by
the Institute of Computational Modeling from the RAS Siberian Branch in Krasnoyarsk, this
research team is widely known for its pioneering work among domestic researchers in the web
mapping and online web services for various subject areas [
The relatively recent Metalogeny geoportal of the RAS Vernadsky State Geological Museum
also supports ISO standards among other spatial data standards, it is equipped with a
builtin metadata editor but uses commercial software [
The INSPIRE standard features the inclusion of elements from the ISO 19119:2005 Geographic
information — Services known as the ISO 19119:2016 after revision. This is primarily due to the
wide distribution of geographic services based on the OGC specifications, including WMS, WFS,
WCS, WMC, CSW, GAZ, WCTS, etc. Another feature of the INSPIRE profile is the description
not only of spatial data sets, but also of their series, if necessary replacing descriptions of
individual (with similar properties) products by descriptions of their collections [
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GeoNode is the other common platform, like the GeoNetwork it is an open source software class; it is used, among many other services, in the Scientific Network for the Caucasus Mountain Region (Caucasus-SDI) geoportal. In addition to the original ISO 19115/ISO 19139 format and text format to display selected metadata elements on geoportal pages, the platform supports the publication of metadata in other formats, including the following ones: • Atom (Atom Syndication Format), developed by a non-commercial regulating organization of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force); • ebRIM (CSW-ebXML Registry Information Model), profile OGC Catalogue Service; • DIF (Global Change Master Directory Interchange Format), compatible with the ISO 19115 and CSDGM, applied in the NASA (USA).
The standard DIF format is also used in The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
Two examples of geoportals of national SDIs conclude the table. A selection of foreign regional and national geoportals is contained, in particular, in Appendix A of the GOST R 58570-2019 “Spatial data infrastructure. Fundamentals”. Typically, the search for multiple datasets, series, and related geographic services is supported by the group of ISO 19115 standards.
The health of the geoportal, like any network service, largely depends on the support of international standards. The analysis reveals that efective search for spatial data resources and related geographic services rests on the use of ISO spatial metadata standards. This statement is true of international and foreign geoportals. None of these Russian geoportals use domestic standards of GOST R 57668-2017 and GOST R 57656-2017. It is worth recalling that the development of an analogue of the ISO/TS 19115-3:2016 Geographic information — Metadata — Part 3: XML schema implementation for fundamental concepts under the national standardization plan is not to be launched until 2021. In the future, we should also revise and evaluate how and to what extent all 19 national standards set for TC 394 Geographic information/Geomatics are operationalised.
This work was supported by the Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, State Assignment No. AAAA-A19-119022190168-8. [1] A Guide to the Role of Standards in Geospatial Information Management. Version 2 — Published August 2018. 31 p. https://committee.iso.org/files/live/users/fh/aj/ aj/tc211contributor%40iso.org/files/Resources/UN-GGIM/Standards-by-Tier-2018.pdf. [2] Koshkarev A.V. Geoportal as a tool for managing spatial data and geographic services //
Spatial Data. 2008. No. 2. P. 6–14. (In Russ.) [3] Koshkarev A.V. Spatial metadata and geoportals as means of geospatial resources integration // Izvestiya RAN. Seriya Geograficheskaya. 2009. No. 1. P. 121–123. (In Russ.)