Portable ISO 19115-2 Open Source Developer's Toolkit (Bureau-wide Application) Completed

Over the last few years, the ISO 19115 family of metadata standards has become the predominantly accepted worldwide standard for sharing information about the availability and usability of scientific datasets among researchers.  The U.S. interests in the ISO standard have also been growing as global-scale science demands participation with the broader international community; however, adoption has been slow because of the complexity and rigor of the ISO metadata standards. In addition, support for the standard in current implementations has been minimal. 



Principal Investigator : Stan Smith, Joshua Bradley

Cooperator/Partner : Chis Turner



In 2009, the Alaska Data Integration Working Group members (ADIwg) mobilized to jointly address common data integration efforts.  Beginning in 2012, ADIwg started to focus on difficulties associated with generating and exchanging metadata using the ISO family of standards.  Like a microcosm of the larger world, ADIwg partners vary in size from small nongovernmental organization research groups to state offices, universities, and large Federal bureaus.  This differential in size and technical capabilities among its membership brings with it the predictable diversity in metadata requirements and ability to provide the necessary technical support to its researchers. 



The ISO 19115 metadata standard is not a single standard but a family of ISO and Geography Markup Language Encoding standards.  Understanding this amalgamation of standards to a degree sufficient to generate a valid metadata record requires an investment of time well beyond what can reasonably be expected of any PI or end user.  These issues are not specific to ADIwg and its members; they are shared by many organizations striving to transition to the ISO metadata standard. 



After much discussion, the ADIwg membership decided to co-author an ISO software toolkit with an architecture that has the flexibility to achieve the following goals:

• Isolate the complexity, rigor, formatting, and terminology of the ISO standards from the PI and (or) data steward.  Users should not be required to be experts on the ISO standards to generate ISO metadata.
• Provide clear developer and user documentation.
• Design a layered architecture and provide developers with access to each layer. Developers should be able to enter the architecture at whatever layer best fits their needs. For example, they should be able to download the code library to do custom programming or post JSON metadata to a hosted JSON-to-ISO translator. 
• Design the architecture to accommodate incremental development cycles and add features without disrupting previous implementations. 
• Implement all code and services as open-source software projects using a GitHub repository (Alaska Data Integration Working Group, 2015a). 
• Use simple JSON for storing and transferring user metadata.
• Provide flexibility to write to multiple metadata standards, including ISO 19115-2:2009, 19115-1:2014, 19110, and possibly the Federal Geographic Data Committee’s (FGDC) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata. 
• Provide an online, interactive, client-side, end-user metadata editor written in JavaScript to gather and edit a user’s metadata and format it in the mdJSON format. 
• Host a publicly available version of the online metadata editor for end users to enter and edit metadata and then request a valid ISO standard metadata record to be returned.
• Write all code in popular, well-supported computer languages that are platform independent, royalty-free, and available through an open-source repository to encourage participation from and benefit to the widest possible user base.

Accomplishments

The FY 2015 accomplishments for this project were as follows:

• ADIwg renamed mdJSON-schema-viewer to mdTools to present a friendlier name and reflect extended capabilities added to the tool (Alaska Data Integration Working Group, [n.d. a]). 
• The project team finalized and published the nonbeta release of mdTools 1.0.0 and updates (1.1.0) with extensions for the following features:
  • notification of deprecated portions of the mdJSON schema
  • support for permalinks, search, and HyperText Markup Language (HTML) writer
  • additional tab for viewing of code lists maintained in mdCodes
  • support for mdJSON schema versions 1.0.0 and 1.1.0
• The project team presented a full afternoon workshop at the 2015 CDI Workshop in Denver on May 11, 2015 (Alaska Data Integration Working Group, 2015b).
• The project team gave a presentation to the ISO Geographic information/Geomatics Technical Committee at the Standards in Action Workshop in London in June 2015.
• The project team finalized and published nonbeta release of mdTranslator 1.0.0 and issued numerous point releases improving code architecture and adding the following features in versions 1.1.0, 1.1.1, 1.2.0, 1.2.1, and 1.3.0 (Alaska Data Integration Working Group, [n.d. b]):
  • support for coverage information, image information, sensor information, classified data, and grids
  • replaced language and character set with local to position for 19115-1
  • ability for user provided Cascading Style Sheets in HTML writer
  • code refactoring to remove all global variables
  • HTML writer for easy online viewing of metadata records
  • an allowance for multiple data dictionaries
• The project team finalized and published nonbeta release of mdCodes 1.0.0 and issued numerous point releases improving code architecture and adding the following features in versions 1.0.1, 1.1.0, and 1.2.1:
  • ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code list
  • ISO 639 Part 2 language code list
  • Internet Assigned Numbers Authority character set code list
  • code lists for cell geometry, dimension name, image condition, and coverage content
• ADIwg selected Ember.js (Katz and others, 2015), Ember-CLI (Ember-CLI, [n.d.]), and Bootstrap (Otto and Thornton, [n.d.]) as development architecture for mdEditor and developed the following elements:
  • “proof-of-concept” prototype using Ember.js framework
  • screenshots and navigation strategy using Balsamiq Mockup in Google Docs  (fig. 15)
  • “live” HTML layout based on mockups to test user experience and Bootstrap components (fig. 16) (Alaska Data Integration Working Group, 2015c)
• The project team documented many of the fundamentals of the ISO Developer’s Toolkit as mdBook using the GitBook publishing service (Alaska Data Integration Working Group, 2015d).

The Ruby Gem (Ruby language code library) for mdTranslator has been downloaded more than 9,000 times as of October 2015.  To fulfill its promised role, the Toolkit will require upgrades, extensions, and support for years to come.



The Toolkit has been, or is planned to be, implemented in multiple environments relating to USGS operations.  USGS ScienceBase has planned to implement the Toolkit as one of its primary engines for generating ISO metadata.  The Landscape Conservation Cooperatives and Climate Science Centers anticipate using the mdEditor and mdTranslator as a tool for scientists to document and format their metadata content.  The Arctic Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, University of Alaska, and Alaska Science Center are currently at various stages of integrating the Toolkit into existing systems.



There is also interest in the Toolkit and mdEditor from other national and international science organizations desiring to participate in the ISO metadata community.  Among these are the Interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee members, Sustaining Arctic Observing Networks, the Arctic Data Committee, and the Polar Data Forum. 



Work is anticipated to continue into 2016 and beyond depending on funding availability.  The following items are planned to be delivered in FY 2016–2017:

• release of initial public version of mdEditor in March 2016
• a writer application for FGDC compliant metadata
• a writer application for ISO 19115-1 compliant metadata
• a possible reader application for FGDC metadata

 



Note: This description is from the Community for Data Integration 2015 Annual Report.