The growing amount of geographic information available and the distributed, heterogeneous nature of this information have changed the traditional role of metadata usage. Correct and useful metadata descriptions of existing geographic information systems (GIS) are key to the discovery of what information is already available, and how to extract it for use in new applications....[ Read more ]

The growing amount of geographic information available and the distributed, heterogeneous nature of this information have changed the traditional role of metadata usage. Correct and useful metadata descriptions of existing geographic information systems (GIS) are key to the discovery of what information is already available, and how to extract it for use in new applications.

This thesis defines the architectural and operational issues surrounding metadata management in a facility, GeoChange, designed to support the discovery and exchange of geographic information. We present which types of metadata are useful to describe and communicate with heterogeneous GIS registered in the system, the distributed architecture and system components used to organize and translate the information between GIS, and the internal structures designed to support the user in the iterative and ad hoc process of metadata mining for the purpose of resource discovery and information retrieval. Implementation issues that are required for implementing this metadata architecture are also addressed.