Poster Presentation C Thursday, 5:00 – 6:00 pm C Edmund Fitzgerald Exhibit Hall

Don’t Duck Metadata! Resources to Help You Document your GIS Data

Nancy Rader, Chris Cialek
Minnesota Planning Land Management Information Center
300 Centennial Building
658 Cedar Street
St. Paul, MN  55155
nancy.rader@state.mn.us

Gathering GIS data is an expensive and time-consuming operation. What’s the single most important thing you can do to maximize the value of that considerable investment? Organizing and recording important details about the data – information referred to as metadata – provides an indispensable resource that helps make the most of your organization’s data for years to come. The Minnesota Geographic Metadata Guidelines (MGMG) offer a common format for gathering and organizing metadata.

This poster provides an overview of the resources that are available to help you document your data. It highlights several recent developments:

1. The availability of DataLogr, a metadata entry tool customized for the MGMG, as a free download from LMIC’s web site. The software is a stand-alone, easy-to-use product upgraded to run on Windows2000 in addition to earlier versions of Windows.

2. The status of efforts to incorporate the MGMG into ArcCatalog, the new application in ESRI’s ArcGIS products that allows users to view and record metadata;

3. Additional metadata resources now available via the “Documentation” section of LMIC’s Clearinghouse page: www.lmic.state.mn.us/chouse/index.html.