Why validate item metadata?

Maintaining complete and accurate metadata is an important function for organizations that publish data for use by outside agencies or the public. The documentation of data content, accuracies, lineage, and currentness serves to reduce liability to the authorizing organization and minimize misuse by data consumers. The Metadata check included with Data Reviewer allows you to automate the validation of a metadata record to determine both compliance with a specific metadata standard and to evaluate individual metadata elements to determine if they are populated with expected values.

Supported metadata resources

The Metadata check supports validation of metadata resources commonly associated with spatial and nonspatial data stored in multiple formats. Metadata information that supports both spatial and nonspatial data stored in a geodatabase can be validated using the Metadata check. This includes the following geodatabase items:

• Features classes (point, line, polygon, and annotation)
• Feature dataset
• Geometric networks
• Image catalogs
• Network datasets
• Raster datasets
• Relationship classes
• Tables
• Terrain datasets
• Topology

The Metadata check also supports file-based spatial data items such as shapefiles and file-based metadata resources in the form of stand-alone metadata documents (stored in XML format). Stand-alone metadata documents include both those created using ArcCatalog, as well as metadata resources created using third-party tools to support metadata management of other vendor formats.

Metadata standard support

The Metadata check supports schema-based validation of metadata resources based on national and international metadata standards. These include schema validation support for the Federal Geographic Data Committee's (FGDC's) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM) and the International Organization for Standardization's 19139:2007 standard for Geographic MetaData XML (gmd) encoding, an XML schema implementation derived from ISO 19115 (Geographic Information - Metadata) and related profiles supported in ArcCatalog. The Metadata check can also be used to validate stand-alone metadata documents using a custom schema to support organizations that create and maintain metadata outside of ArcCatalog.

The Metadata check also supports the evaluation of metadata element values using either predefined or custom XPath expressions based on a national, international or ESRI-specific metadata element tag set. Using predefined XPath expressions you can determine whether specific metadata elements are missing or blank. You can also determine whether element values conform to established formatting standards commonly found in metadata such as U.S. phone numbers, U.S. ZIP codes, e-mail addresses, and calendar dates. Using custom XPath expressions allows advanced users to create and share complex XPath 1.0-compliant expressions to evaluate metadata element values either individually or against other metadata elements.