skip to content
Primary navigation

Producing ArcCatalog 10 Metadata for the Minnesota Geospatial Commons

Although the standalone Minnesota Metadata Editor (MME) software is a straightforward route to producing metadata for the Minnesota Geospatial Commons, many people would prefer to use ArcCatalog to create their metadata. The ArcCatalog metadata tool set has several advantages:

For ArcGIS 8.x and 9.x, the Minnesota community had customized the ArcCatalog editor to follow the Minnesota Geospatial Metadata Guidelines, calling it the MGMG Editor.

At ArcGIS 10.0, the Esri metadata model radically changed, and the MGMG Editor no longer works. Since many organizations that could contribute GIS data to the Commons are accustomed to creating their metadata in ArcCatalog, MnGeo is researching ways to make metadata created in ArcCatalog work for the Commons with the least customization.

The following information is the result of our research so far. Contact us with questions or suggestions at:  gisinfo.mngeo@state.mn.us
 


Best Practices

The Best Practices document contains basic steps and screenshots.
 


Summary Points

ArcCatalog users can choose from several “metadata styles”

According to Esri documentation, the metadata style “determines how metadata is viewed, exported, and validated, and which pages appear when editing metadata.”
 

The default ArcCatalog metadata style and the native XML tags used by ArcCatalog cannot be used to produce Commons-ready metadata

To produce Commons-compliant metadata in ArcCatalog you must use the “FGDC-CSDGM” metadata style

For Commons validation, pay attention to these fields

Export to FGDC XML format

Create HTML

       or

Overview of Steps to Create Commons-Compatible Metadata in ArcCatalog

Other Editor Options

Other editors can be used to create Commons-compliant metadata. Contact gisinfo.mngeo@state.mn.us if you have questions about these options:

The main advantage to using one of these editors/add-ins is the readability of the editor. The main disadvantage is that these tools, used with ArcCatalog, cannot take advantage of ArcCatalog's auto-populate function.

 

back to top