Reducing Consumer Uncertainty: Towards an Ontology for Geospatial User-Centric Metadata

With the increased use of geospatial datasets across heterogeneous user groups and domains, assessing fitness-for-use is emerging as an essential task. Users are presented with an increasing choice of data from various portals, repositories, and clearinghouses. Consequently, comparing the quality and evaluating fitness-for-use of different datasets presents major challenges for spatial data users. While standardization efforts have significantly improved metadata interoperability, the increasing choice of metadata standards and their focus on data production rather than potential data use and application, renders typical metadata documents insufficient for effectively communicating fitness-for-use. Thus, research has focused on the challenge of communicating fitness-for-use of geospatial data, proposing a more “user-centric” approach to geospatial metadata. We present the Geospatial User-Centric Metadata ontology (GUCM) for communicating fitness-for-use of spatial datasets to users in the spatial and other domains, to enable them to make informed data source selection decisions. GUCM enables metadata description for various components of a dataset in the context of different application domains. It captures producer-supplied and user-described metadata in structured format using concepts from domain-independent ontologies. This facilitates interoperability between spatial and nonspatial metadata on open data platforms and provides the means for searching/discovering spatial data based on user-specified quality and fitness-for-use criteria.