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Metadata

Having good metadata is essential for the discoverability and usability of your published (map) data.

Version 1.0 of GeoCat Bridge still offers limited support for metadata.
This section discusses the (im)possibilities of metadata publishing in GeoCat Bridge.

Editing

In contrast to its ArcMap predecessor, GeoCat Bridge for ArcGIS Pro no longer offers a metadata editor. There also aren't any plans to add this feature back in the future.

To edit metadata, users should either:

  • Use the built-in metadata editor in ArcGIS Pro, provided that their metadata is stored in the ArcGIS metadata format.
  • Use a third-party or tailor-made metadata editor tool.
  • Let Bridge publish a "placeholder" to GeoNetwork that references the map layer(s), and then edit the metadata there.

Publishing

This version of GeoCat Bridge can only publish ISO 19139 metadata records to GeoNetwork.

It is able to successfully publish your metadata when:

  • Your metadata is in the ArcGIS metadata format, in which case Bridge will export it to ISO 19139.
  • Your metadata already complies to the ISO 19139 format (e.g. ISO 19115 XML).

Bridge currently uses ArcGIS Pro's API to extract metadata from the map layers or their data sources.

Updating

When publishing metadata, GeoCat Bridge will overwrite existing records in GeoNetwork when the UUID matches.

Although Bridge cannot edit the metadata (especially not if it's source metadata, for which ArcGIS Pro enforces strict read-only mode), it will update an ISO 19139 copy of the original metadata before the record is pushed to GeoNetwork. The following items are updated:

  • The metadata title if missing, in which case it is set to the layer name.
  • The date that the record was created, if it's missing.
  • The date (timestamp) that the record was last modified.
  • The spatial extent (bounding box) of the record.
  • The spatial reference (CRS).
Metadata ID

A new unique identifier (UUID) is generated by Bridge only when it's missing (e.g. for layer metadata), in which case the UUID is also stored as custom layer data in the ArcGIS Pro project (.aprx) for future reference.

Synchronization

GeoCat Bridge does not support metadata synchronization yet. For source metadata, ArcGIS Pro does not allow writing metadata back to the original source.

GeoCat is currently working on a solution that will allow Bridge to save the metadata edits that were published to GeoNetwork back to the source metadata. However, this feature will only work on standard PostgreSQL databases (i.e. not SDE) and file-based data sources, e.g. Shapefiles, raster files, and so on.