Re: Introduction from Waitakere, New Zealand

["Mark Taylor" <mtaylor@walis01.walis.wa.gov.au>]

Andrew Bashfield wrote

> 
> It's time to adopt a metadata standard and document our data sets. We   
> have a particular emphasis on "fitness for use" and have the issue of   
> combining many data sets created by different agencies for different   
> purposes. Apart from documentation being good housekeeping, our need for   
> metadata stems from the requirement to be able to defend our land   
> development boundaries in appeal proceedings.

The ANZLIC Guidelines on Core Metadata Elements for Land and
Geographic Data Directories, Version 1 The Guidelines provide a model
for a national metadata directory system and define a small number of
core metadata elements that ANZLIC believes should be recorded for
all spatial data. 

Copies of the Guidelines are available from
http://www.auslig.gov.au/pipc/anzlic/anzlicma.htm

As the title indicates the guidelines are designed for directory 
purposes and as such for data discovery. However the elements 
described in the guidelines also represent a lot of the information 
required for data management and data transfer needs. 

There are obviously other descriptive elements required for these
purposes which are not included in these guidelines.  To cater for
these other needs the ANZLIC strategy is accomodate other levels of
information (level 1 for State or theme based criteria and level 2
for organisational criteria). 

The ANZLIC elements are based on the US
FGDC metadata specifications
(http://www.fgdc.gov/Metadata/metav1-0.html ) and Australian and NZ
users are encouraged, when using other descriptive criteria to

a) use the FGDC specifications where applicable and
b) advise ANZLIC of the additional details so that ANZLIC can encourage 
    consistent specifications to be used.

One of the key aspects of the ANZLIC guidelines is the use of
quality statements. While quality statements are not necessary to
enable discovery of data, ANZLIC considers the importance of quality
statements to be an essential criteria for the documentation of data
and are using the guidelines to encourage this.

 

Regards

Mark

---------------------------------------------------------

Mark Taylor
System Planner
Western Australian Land Information System (WALIS)
PO Box 2222 Midland 6056 WA
email markt@walis.wa.gov.au
ph 61-9-273 7038
fax 61-9-273 7691
home page http://www.walis.wa.gov.au