AGI, as the custodian of the UK’s national geospatial metadata standard – GEMINI (Geospatial Metadata Initiative), are currently working with the Geospatial Commission (GC) to review and investigate the potential for extending the current GEMINI (2.3) standard to better align with current best web practice for search optimization with the end aim of improving resource discoverability – both for data publishers and for potential end users of geospatial data and services.
“Capitalizing on previous GC work on Data Discoverability (Parts 1 and 2), the current “Part 3″ focusses on implementing the findings of the previous work – including requesting changes to GEMINI, the UK’s national geospatial metadata profile. The work is being overseen by the expert AGI Standards group and is ultimately aimed at the broader use case of making it easier for a less geo-literate audience to find and assess spatial data.”
This work has the potential to make geodata publishers’ data holdings more visible, providing better information on what is available, under which terms of use, and to what quality level – important to assess what purposes it can be used for.
This aim has long been an ambition for AGI and traces its origins virtually all the way back to the seminal Chorley report (which spawned AGI), through later initiatives like AskGIraffe and GIGateway.
AGI’s GEMINI has served the community well but needs to evolve as web search, protocols and user expectations change. AGI is working to ensure that the UK GI community has the key standards and guidance in place to keep the UK at the forefront of geospatial good practise.