A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SPATIAL DATA HARVEST STANDARDS

Abstract. So far, thousand kinds of Spatial Data were acquired, produced, published and used for specialized applications. Heterogeneity is obviously one key problem for spatial data in the process of its creating, structuring or managing. The heterogeneity keeps the complete and variety of spatial data, but induces the difficulty of describing, publishing, sharing, interoperability or metadata harvesting. Decentralized, multi-organization and synchronization are the major features of the next generation spatial data service infrastructure. Standard research on geospatial metadata harvesting and data service is becoming a research focus. More and more organizations and consortiums (e.g. ISO/TC 211, OGC) drafted and released their geospatial metadata and service standards. However, these standards are diverse in order to fit to different spatial data format and research fields, which makes spatial data owner hard to choose standard. The paper focuses on analyzing metadata harvesting from multi-organizations archives, including Spatial Data description, publishing, sharing, and interoperability. Several of most widely used Spatial Data standards are introduced, and compared. Advices on how to choose the standards are given for Spatial Data owner.