A Software Architecture for Automated Geographic Metadata Annotation Generation

To facilitate data search and retrieval, a geographic data repository publishes metadata about the data resources it houses. Metadata generation is, however, a time consuming and error prone activity. Exploring unique characteristics of geographic objects, we first discuss a strategy that combines federations of gazetteers, thesauri and catalogs to harvest the information required for metadata annotations. Then, we propose a software architecture, ISO 19115:2003 compliant, for automated geographic metadata annotation generation. Finally, we describe the GeoCatalog tool, an implementation of the proposed architecture that demonstrates the viability of our approach.