Metadata Education Project

Metadata for a Data Series

The example used here metadata for the USGS Digital Raster Graphics series. An individual digitial image is available for each 7.5 minute quadrangle, but the abstract, purpose, data quality, organization, and attributes are the same for each image. The only differences are in the images title, source data, zone of projection, and spatial domain.

Here is an example of a metadata document produced specifically for one image.

For comparison, here is a metadata document produced for the entire series. Pay specific attention to the generic title, range of dates, spatial domain, and projection information. Reference to specific names, dates, spatial domains, and UTM zones is made in the Entity and Attribute Overview.

The advantages to the series metadata is that any changes that need to be made can be made to just two files, the metadata documents itself or the attached table. Otherwise, changes would have to be made to over 1700 metadata documents for each image within the series!