Geospatial metadata sharing

Or: How do I cite a place?



Stuart Grieve (@GIStuart)

Univeristy College London

Problem

Topographic data is key to geospatial science

OCR

The data is (nearly!) all open

But people work on spatial subsets of the data

OCR

Current 'solution'

People cite the source dataset

And never share/publish the subset they use

Barrier to reproducibility



Emailing data

Better Solution

Create some tools to compile relevant metadata into a file:

  • Spatial bounding box (latitude/longitude)
  • Spatial Coordinate system (EPSG codes: spatialreference.org
  • DOI of source data
  • DOI of paper (optional)
  • Other things?

Technologies

Build upon OGC tools including RasterIO, Fiona, Shapely, GDAL, so could work in most languages.

Python

Javascript?

Metadata

Vision

Given a topographic dataset, press a button and get shareable metadata

Use this data to reconstruct the original topographic dataset from its source