Metadata Editing

GeoCat Bridge provides a basic editor for metadata properties to create ISO19139-compliant metadata records. The purpose of this editor is to easily complete a minimal subset of required metadata elements:

  • Title

  • Abstract

  • ISO topic category

  • Keywords

  • Metadata contact

  • Data contact

  • Access constraints (used for data license)

  • Use constraints (also known as Fees)

  • Metadata language

When publishing metadata to GeoNetwork, Bridge will convert the QGIS metadata (QMD) into the ISO19139 format. Note that in order to do that, Bridge uses the lxml library, which may not be installed.

You can edit the Bridge metadata fields directly, or use the QGIS metadata editor by clicking the Open QGIS metadata editor button.
Note that you can also click the … buttons next to each Bridge metadata field to open the QGIS metadata editor a specific page:
_images/publish_metadata.png

Preview metadata

To see a preview of the metadata of the selected layer, click the previewmetadata button.

This will open a new dialog and render the metadata as a simple HTML webpage:

_images/metadata_preview.png

Metadata validation

Bridge can use built-in QGIS validation tools and display the result of the metadata validation. Click the validatemetadata button to validate your metadata.

After validation a dialog with the results is displayed:

_images/metadata_validation.png

Load metadata

If your layer has metadata in ISO19139 or ESRI-ISO (ISO19115 or FGDC) format, and that metadata is available in an auxiliary file stored alongside the data file, QGIS will not automatically read it.

QGIS only has native support for its own qmd format. However, Bridge is able to import the metadata.
Select the layer in the Bridge dialog and click the loadmetadata button.
Bridge will look in the folder where the layer file is stored and try to find a metadata file named either [layer_filename].[extension].xml or [layer_filename].xml.
For example, for a layer data source named countries.shp, it will search for both countries.shp.xml and countries.xml. If such a file exists, and it is in one of the supported ISO formats mentioned above, Bridge will convert it into the QGIS metadata format and import all elements that it could find.
If no auxiliary metadata file could be found, Bridge will ask you if you wish to manually select it:
_images/manually_load_metadata.png

If you click Yes, a file dialog will open so you can select the metadata file to import.

Note

  • Some (non-supported) elements of the original metadata may get lost in the transformation.

  • Changes in the metadata editor will not be saved to the original imported metadata file.

  • Because of a dependency, Bridge may not be able to import metadata. If this is the case, a warning will be displayed.

Warning

If you wish to persist the imported/edited metadata for another time, it is important that you save the QGIS project before your close the application.
However, within the same QGIS session (i.e. for the time that the application is being used), the metadata for each layer will be memorized.