Challenges in harmonizing geospatial metadata

The development and adoption of online data distribution platforms has vastly improved access to geospatial resources. Metadata is the key to discovery of these resources, but the accompanying geospatial metadata ecosystem lags behind in terms of tools, authoring practices, and dedicated development efforts. As a result, it suffers from interoperability issues due to competing standards, inconsistent applications of schemas, and varying levels of descriptive quality. Our presentations will describe research into mitigating these issues and our progress on establishing consortia approaches to the creation of a shared corpus of geospatial metadata records. This work emerges from the growing community of developers and users of open source geospatial data discovery applications, particularly GeoBlacklight. We will provide an overview of the GeoBlacklight metadata schema and the main challenges that obstruct sharing metadata between projects. We will also introduce a proposed metadata scoring strategy, which provides a framework to evaluate its quality and can serve to inform decisions about cross-institutional metadata record ingest. The presentations will be followed by a moderated discussion on recommendations for remediating metadata, how this work can improve user experience, and opportunities for collaboration.