GIgateway® Newsletter February 2004

UK GEMINI: Holding the Key to a National Geospatial Metadata Standard

GEMINI, the Geo-spatial Metadata Interoperability Initiative, has just completed its first successful month of public consultation. Comments were received from DEFRA, Office of National Statistics and several Local Authorities and Universities. Also, the Local Futures Group , as part of its Local Futures Academy, provided feedback via a detailed workshop entitled ‘Data Issues’. Twelve participants brainstormed essential metadata elements, compared them to the proposed GEMINI profile of ISO 19115 and then submitted a recommendation as a group to the GEMINI stakeholders.

The GEMINI stakeholders group met on 11 February and discussed every query submitted as feedback. To learn more about the proposals click here... (PDF).

Please follow developments of the evolving profile on the GIgateway® website. If you have any questions regarding GEMINI or ISO 19115, please address these to Judy Jerome, Information Services Manager, AGI.

Coming Soon: MetaGenie Online 

Following hot on the heals of the MetaGenie data editor, comes MetaGenie Online – the web-based version of the tool. We are expecting this to be popular with smaller organisations who only a few metadata records to publish on GIgateway®, where it is not worthwhile for them to create and manage their own node.

Registration for MetaGenie Online will be a simple process, carried out on the GIgateway® website. Organisations will then have unlimited access to the tool to create and maintain their metadata records. Any records they create will be validated and automatically published on GIgateway®.

Look out for MetaGenie Online arriving on GIgateway® very soon.

Transforming the Data Directory

Sometime in the next couple of months GIgateway's Data Directory service will undergo a significant transformation. This part of the service currently provides information on the UKSGB and links to relevant data products. However, common agreement on exactly what constituted the UK's key datasets and core spatial units has never been fully achieved. As a result the Data Directory, although informative, is now a static and fairly undynamic part of GIgateway®.

Instead, we want to provide something our users will find much more practical and informative and are therefore working to create a Directory of UK organisations who create geographic information. In the future this will extend to provide a similar advertising tool for those companies offering products and services that help to increase access to geographic information. In other words, a true Data Directory. But don't worry if you use the Data Directory as it currently is; we will be retaining the information on the UKSGB and it's key datasets in our online archive.

If you think your organisation should be listed in the new Data Directory pages then please do not hesitate to get in touch; we would love to hear from you! Please email Louise with details of your organisation and a point of contact.

GIgateway® User Survey

The GIgateway® team would like to thank you for participating in our online user survey. We are always interested in discovering who our users are and to what degree they find our content useful. This survey focuses mainly on the user’s experiences when using the Data Locator search. We would greatly appreciate it if you could participate in the survey each you complete a Data Locator search. The information generated will assist us with our future planning by helping us determine your needs. The survey is short and very easy to complete.

To participate in the survey, please visit the Data Locator. Many thanks in advance.

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Tel: 020 7253 5211 / Fax: 020 7251 4505 / info@gigateway.org.uk