edpMGB - A Metadata Editor Built as SaaS for the Brazilian

Geospatial Metadata Profile

Marcos Montanari, Vitor Dias, Eduardo Lourenço and Jugurta Lisboa-Filho

Department of Informatics, Federal University of Viçosa, Viçosa, MG, Brazil

Keywords: Spatial Data Infrastructure, INDE, Editor, Metadata, MGB Profile.

Abstract: Aiming to encourage the reuse and prevent wasting resources in the production of spatial data, in 2008, the

Brazilian government edited Act 6,666, instituting the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (Infraestrutura

Nacional de Dados Espaciais - INDE). To meet the need of geospatial data documentation, the INDE

defined the Brazilian Geospatial Metadata (MGB) profile based on ISO 19115:2003. This paper describes

the development of edpMGB, a metadata editor for the MGB profile. The editor is open-source and is being

released in the cloud via Web following the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, so it can be accessed from

any point on the Internet, requiring only a Web browser. This editor was developed on the scope of the

research and development project (R&D) Geoportal Cemig – SDI-based corporate GIS (Geoportal Cemig -

SIG corporativo baseado em IDE), whose objective is the implementation of a corporate SDI for the Minas

Gerais Power Company (Companhia Energética de Minas Gerais - Cemig).

1 INTRODUCTION

Within Information and Communication

Technology, information redundancy and lack of

data standardization proves very common. The same

data often ends up being produced, managed, used,

and stored by several independent producers that use

different formats and standards, who seek to meet

exclusively the individual needs of specific users

(Dornelles and Iescheck, 2013).

The greater production of spatial data requires

documenting them so they can be reused. A piece of

data immersed in its context becomes information,

however, with no such documentation, it is virtually

worthless information (Nebert, 2004).

In order to prevent actions in duplicity and

wasted resources to obtain spatial data, the Brazilian

government began, in 2003, studies aiming to

integrate and reuse geospatial data produced by the

different federal administration organs. In 2008, Act

6,666 of November 27th established the National

Spatial Data Infrastructure (Infraestrutura Nacional

de Dados Espaciais - INDE) (Brasil, 2008). INDE’s

goal is “to catalog, integrate, and harmonize the

geospatial data produced and maintained by the

different governmental institutions so as to facilitate

their location, exploration, and access by any user

connected to the Internet” (Concar, 2009).

To Leme (2006), geographic metadata

correspond to the documentation of geographic data

and are created according to standards. Such

standards consist of a set of regulations that allow

the geographic data to be described textually in a

previously established manner (Leme, 2006). The

most well-known geographic metadata standards

were defined by the Federal Geographic Data

Committee (FGDC) and by the International

Organization of Standards (ISO). These institutions

established international geographic metadata

standards that meet the needs of different users, thus

which comprises the variability in geographic

information (Prado et al., 2010).

In order to meet the metadata standardization

demands started by INDE, the National Cartography

Committee (CONCAR) created the Brazilian

Geospatial Metadata Profile (MGB Profile) based on

norm ISO 19115:2003. A metadata profile is a basic

set of elements that portray the characteristics of

geospatial products of a given community and

guarantees their identification (ISO, 2003).

Based on norm ISO 19139:2007, XML schemas

were defined to materialize and code ISO

19115:2003 as a file. Since the MGB profile is based

on norm ISO 19115:2003, its metadata must also

follow the materialization standards defined in norm

19139:2007 to increase the interoperability among

Montanari, M., Dias, V., Lourenço, E. and Lisboa-Filho, J.

edpMGB - A Metadata Editor Built as SaaS for the Brazilian Geospatial Metadata Proﬁle.

In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management (GISTAM 2016), pages 24-31

ISBN: 978-989-758-188-5

the systems that use the profile as their base (Pascoal

et al., 2013).

The present paper aims to describe the

development of edpMGB, a metadata editor for the

MGB profile. edpMGB is open-source software and

is available on the cloud via the web following the

model Software as a Service (SaaS). Thus, it can be

accessed from anywhere and requires only a web

browser (Weiss, 2007). Some features of this

metadata editor are also available through web

services, which allow other systems to use some of

this tool’s features.

This editor was developed in the context of the

research and development (R&D) project

“GeoPortal Cemig – SIG corporativo baseado em

IDE” (Cemig GeoPortal – SDI-based corporate GIS)

being developed to help implement a corporate SDI

for Minas Gerais Power Company - Cemig

(Compania Energética de Minas Gerais).

The main reason for developing edpMGB was

the need for a specific tool for this metadata standard

focusing on the Brazilian technical audience that

works with spatial information. Other editors are

available in the market, such as CatMDEdit

(Catmdedit, 2015) and GeoNetwork (GeoNetwork,

2012). Although these are metadata editors, they are

not specific for documenting metadata in the MGB

profile. GeoNetwork, in particular, can be used

alongside the editor described in the present study.

2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

2.1 Cloud Computing

According to Armbrust et al. (2010), cloud

computing refers to applications provided as online

services as well as the hardware and software

systems that provide such services. These systems

favor the user’s access to different applications using

the internet, regardless of the platform used or where

the user is. Therefore, all data processing and

storage occurs at some online datacenter, as virtual

servers.

Cloud computing takes place through different

types of services. The main one, which will be

approached in this study, is the concept of Software

as a Service (SaaS) (Yang et al., 2011). This type of

service has several resources that the end user can

access via web browsers (Armbrust et al., 2010).

The metadata editor presented in this study is an

example of SaaS.

2.2 Web Services

According to the W3C (2004), a web service is a

software system designed to support the

interoperability among machines on a network. A

web service is accessed through platform-

independent protocols and data formats such as the

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), eXtensible

Markup Language (XML), and Simple Object

Access Protocol (SOAP). A web service’s interface

is accessible through standardized XML messages,

i.e., in text format (Lopez-Pellicer, 2012).

The editor hereby presented makes available web

services that can be accessed via SOAP by any

application regardless of the technology used, with

no need to access the system’s interface. The

services can be used by developers that want to use

them in their applications.

2.3 Brazilian Geospatial Metadata

Profile (MGB Profile)

According to Pascoal et al., (2013), the purpose of

the MGB profile is to establish a national standard to

structure geospatial metadata. It was created with the

collaboration of representatives of Brazilian

geospatial-data-producing organs. The profile was

entirely based on the international norm ISO 19115

(ISO, 2003). However, this profile does not define

how these metadata are structured in electronic files,

which is managed by norm ISO 19139:2007. Based

on Pascoal et al., (2013), norm ISO 19139 aims to

materialize the concepts of ISO 19115:2003 into a

file by coding these metadata in XML schemas.

Before the MGB profile was created, the profiles

previously established in several other countries

were analyzed, all of which based on norm ISO

19115, such as the following profiles:

 MIG – Metadados de Informação Geográfica

(Portugal);

 NEM – Núcleo Español de Metadados (Spain);

 NAP – North American Profile (USA/Canada);

 LAMP – Latin American Metadata Profile

(proposed for Latin America).

The MGB profile has a simplified version called

summarized profile, which represents the minimum

elements the geospatial metadata must have. The

summarized profile has 23 elements, illustrated in

Table 1. The idea is to make the adoption of the full

MGB profile, comprising 82 elements, optional

while all data in Brazil must be documented with at

least this summarized core (Concar, 2009).

edpMGB - A Metadata Editor Built as SaaS for the Brazilian Geospatial Metadata Proﬁle

When the MGB profile was being built, the ISO

19115 standard was analyzed in order to identify the

section, entities, and elements that describe the

characteristics of the geospatial data produced in

Brazil. Thus, the profile defines a subset of elements

available in ISO 19115, changes the cardinality of

some elements, and defines some code lists (Pascoal

et al., 2013).

The elements in the MGB profile are organized

into the following sections (Concar, 2009):

 Section 1 (Identification) - provides basic

information on the geospatial dataset such as

title, date, person or institution responsible, and

summary of the data;

 Section 2 (Identification of the geographic

dataset – GDS) - refers to the information

required to identify and evaluate a GDS. This

section characterizes the type of spatial

representation, scale, language, extension, etc.;

 Section 3 (Restriction information) - publicizes

information regarding access and use restrictions

and is made up of two entities, one regarding

legal restrictions and the other, security

restrictions;

 Section 4 (Quality) - allows the quality of a

dataset to be evaluated by informing the

hierarchical level, linage, and report on the data;

 Section 5 (Maintenance information) - informs

the maintenance and update frequency;

 Section 6 (Spatial representation information) -

describes the mechanisms used to represent the

spatial information (matrix or vector);

 Section 7 (Reference system) - information on

the reference system, including the coordinates

system and the geodesic referential of the spatial

dataset;

 Section 8 (Content information) - describes the

catalog of features and the content of the matrix

data;

 Section 9 (Distribution) - reports information

related to the distributor and to the alternatives to

obtain geographic data;

 Section 10 (Metadata) - section responsible for

information on its own metadata. It includes the

person or institution responsible, creation date,

norm used, etc.

2.4 Norm ISO 19139:2007

Norm ISO 19139:2007 defines a set of XML

schemas for metadata defined in ISO 19115:2003. It

aims to define a file format for geospatial metadata

that follows ISO 19115:2003. These schemas enable

structuring and validating the metadata’s XML files

in accordance with the norm (ISO, 2007). The XML

format allows the metadata instances to go around

the internet, including geospatial web services, as

predicted in the specification of the Web Services

Catalog (Nebert et al., 2007).

Maintained since 1998 by the W3C, XML is a

flexible and simple mark-up language. Its main

characteristics are being a text-based language,

separating content from formatting, being simple

and easily interpreted, and allowing the creation of

Table 1: Entities and elements of the metadata core of the summarized MGB profile.

Entity/Element Condition Entity/Element Condition

1. Title mandatory 13. Reference system mandatory

2. Date mandatory 14. Linage optional

3. Responsible mandatory 15. Online access optional

4. Geographic extension conditional 16. Metadata identifier optional

5. Language mandatory 17. Standard metadata name optional

6. Character encoding conditional 18. Metadata norm version optional

7. Thematic category mandatory 19. Metadata language conditional

8. Spatial resolution optional 20. Metadata character encoding conditional

9. Summary mandatory 21. Responsible for the metadata mandatory

10. Distribution format mandatory 22. Metadata date mandatory

11. Time and altimetry extension optional 23. Status mandatory

12. Type of spatial representation optional

GISTAM 2016 - 2nd International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management

limitless tags, which facilitates online data exchange

(Goldberg, 2009). An XML document can be

considered well formatted if it matches what it

prescribed in the norms (Bray et al., 2006). This

document can be valid as long as it follows some

norms described in its grammar. The XML Schema

Definition (XSD) is an XML grammar format

(Fallside and Walmsley, 2004). ISO 19139 is

described as XML schemas built under the

specification by Thompson et al. (2004).

3 RELATED WORKS

Filling out metadata is hard work, as is any other

product cataloging.

The use of software to generate geographic

metadata files in several formats that meet different

norms has been proposed to improve geographic

data documentation. Among these tools, the

freeware ones such as CatMDEdit and GeoNetwork

stand out, both featuring forms to fill out the

metadata according to a pre-defined profile and

enabling the automatic extraction of some

characteristics from the dataset.

3.1 CatMDEdit

CatMDEdit (Catmdedit, 2015) is a tool to edit and

visualize metadata in several standards that

facilitates resource documentation, particularly

geographic information. It is developed by the

Instituto Geográfico Nacional de España (IGN)

along with the Advanced Information Systems

Group (IAAA) from the University of Zaragoza,

with technical support from the GeoSpatiumLab

(GSL). The tool was implemented in Java and has

important features for metadata documentation,

among which: The system is multiplatform (running

on Linux and Windows); multilingual (Spanish,

English, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, and

Czech); open source, supporting the automated

metadata file extraction and generation (Shapefile,

DGN, ECW, FICC, GeoTIFF, GIF/GFW, JPG/JGW,

PNG/PGW); and it converts and personalizes

metadata standards to generate new metadata

standards and profiles in order to serve all types of

geographic data.

3.2 GeoNetwork

GeoNetwork (GeoNetwork, 2012) is a standardized

decentralized environment based on a catalog

system to facilitate geospatial data access, recovery,

update, and management. It provides a complete

environment with metadata editor and catalog with

search functions. It also carries an online interactive

map viewer using web map service. It is currently

used in countless SDI initiatives worldwide. Some

of its main features include: (1) native support to the

metadata standards ISO 19115, ISO 19139, FGDC,

and Dublin Core, besides being able do configure a

new metadata standard profile; (2) metadata

synchronization among distributed catalogs; (3) user

management and customized access control; (4)

cataloging and access to several types of data and

documents (upload/download); (5) interface with

multilingual support; and (6) metadata importing in

the ISO 19115 standard into a metadata profile

configured in GeoNetwork. This system is free and

open-source, which facilitates its evolution and

customization by SDI developers.

What differentiates edpMGB from the editors

mentioned in this section is that the former is a SaaS

system that does not need to be installed on the

user’s machine, besides having a simplified interface

that helps users document metadata. Moreover, it is

the only editor specific for the MGB profile and its

interface has the local advantage of being in

Portuguese.

4 edpMGB - MGB PROFILE

METADATA EDITOR

Metadata documentation in the MGB profile is an

important task for them to be shared and reused. Up

until now, no other editor specific for the MGC

profile has been created, hence, each metadata set is

specified according to the preferences of their

authors (Pascoal et al., 2013).

edpMGB is a web application developed with the

Google Web toolkit (GWT), a framework developed

by Google for web-applications. The GWT used the

java programming language to develop applications

and the tool itself converts the JavaScript code so

that the application can be interpreted by any web

browser regardless of the platform the user is

running.

Through edpMGB, the user can create, edit, and

save metadata as a .xml file following international

standards so it can be used in several geospatial

tools. Before the XML file is generated, it must be

validated according to the MGB profile rules.

One of the components of GeoPortal Cemig is

the geospatial metadata catalog. Therefore, the

metadata are documented through edpMGB, thus

integrating SDI-Cemig to the INDE.

edpMGB - A Metadata Editor Built as SaaS for the Brazilian Geospatial Metadata Proﬁle

Figure 1 illustrates edpMGB’s home screen. The

left-hand side has the navigation tree separated into

sections and profile elements. The center-right area

features the screen with the MGB profile fields

divided into ten panels that represent the sections,

which may be accessed using the green arrows to the

right or to the left.

Figure 2 (a) shows the rules of enforcement,

occurrence, and type of value of an element. The

icon shown in Figure 2 (b) shows an element’s

detailed information.

The bottom part of the home screen features the

editor buttons panel. The button “Abrir” (Open)

displays the dialog box where the user can load an

XML file to be edited. Each element of the profile

will be loaded in its respective text box.

The button “Limpar” (Clear) clears the open

element’s text box, while “Limpar Tudo” (Clear All)

clears all text boxes of the metadata being edited.

The button “Validar” (Validate) performs one of

the system's main features, which is to validate

whether the metadata is in accordance with the XML

schema of the MGB profile. When the button is

clicked, the system verifies the data input and may

display, for instance, a dialog box as shown in

Figure 3 to inform that the metadata does not respect

the MGB profile’s rules. The dialog box displays an

error log alerting the user and showing which fields

are not in accordance with the rules. The user may

keep editing the metadata or store it in his or her

machine even if it is not validated for the MGB

profile. When a non-validated metadata is generated,

it is tagged informing it does not conform to the

MGB profile.

Figure 1: edpMGB’s home screen.

Figure 2: Warning dialog about mandatory elements.

GISTAM 2016 - 2nd International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management

Figure 3: Result with errors found by the validation service.

Figure 4: XML file generation screen.

edpMGB - A Metadata Editor Built as SaaS for the Brazilian Geospatial Metadata Proﬁle

A generateXMLScript() method receives as

parameter the elements of the MGB profile, which

are validated by the method validateMGB(), then the

former outputs the XML script as a string.

The method validateMGB() validates the

metadata according to the MGB profile, receiving its

elements as parameter and outputting a list with the

error messages found in the metadata or an empty

list in case it respects the profile.

To Pascoal et al., (2013), most metadata

provided by national data producers do not fully

respect the profile's rules, which is a big issue since

it compromises the interoperability among the

systems that use the same profile. Nonetheless, the

impossibility of saving a non-validated metadata

may cause problems to users, perhaps due to the lack

of information on the metadata elements. Hence, the

user has the option of saving the metadata even if it

does not conform to the MGB profile and, if needed,

load it again in the tool for further editing. The

“XML” button saves the metadata as a .xml file

(Figure 4) that contains all information input in the

fields. The .xml file is saved in the user’s computer.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The present paper presented the development of a

geographic metadata editor that follows the concept

of Software as a Service (SaaS) and is available to

any user with internet access. edpMGB was

developed specifically to create geospatial metadata

in accordance with the Perfil de Metadados

Geoespaciais do Brasil (MGB profile). Besides

using software developed in his or her native tongue,

the user has easy access to the system with no need

to install it locally. edpMGB may also be used to

change metadata sets created with other editors (e.g.,

Geonetwork).

The feature of validating whether the metadata is

in accordance with the standard defined by the MGB

profile helps produce higher quality, more complete

and correct metadata. However, the user may save

the documents still incomplete, in which case the

metadata receives a tag of non-conformity with the

MGB profile.

Since the XML validation and generation were

also developed as web services, other developers

will be able to remotely create applications (e.g.,

metadata catalog manager) that use the services

implemented in the tool through SOAP, which

broadens the tool’s reach.

As proved by Pascoal et al. (2013), most

metadata sets currently available in the INDE do not

conform to the MGB profile. Therefore, this

metadata editor with its XML schema conformity

validation service is an important contribution to

INDE’s evolution.

This editor was developed in the context of the

research and development (R&D) project

“GeoPortal Cemig” being developed to help

implement a corporate SDI for Cemig - Minas

Gerais Power Company. One of the components of

GeoPortal Cemig is the geospatial metadata catalog,

whose metadata are documented via edpMGB,

which integrates SDI-Cemig to the INDE.

Finally, being free open-source software,

edpMGB may also be adapted to other geospatial

metadata standards and/or profiles.

As future works, other features that will be

implemented include: the development of a web

service to index terms used in the metadata’s

documentation so that they can be recovered

semantically from a vocabulary specific to the power

sector, structured through a hyperbolic tree;

integration of the editor with automated extraction

modules of the rectangle involving the geospatial

data; treatment of strongly related metadata

collections; etc.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project was partially funded by the Brazilian

research promotion agencies Fapemig and CAPES,

along with Companhia Energética de Minas Gerais

- Cemig.

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edpMGB - A Metadata Editor Built as SaaS for the Brazilian Geospatial Metadata Proﬁle