Easing the Creation of Metadata in QGIS

In a previous blog post, I presented QGIS enhancement #91, which aims at providing the infrastructure in QGIS to author, consume and share standards-based metadata (e.g.: ISO).

In this post I would like to focus on a specific WP which aims at easing the task of authoring metadata. Let’s face it: this is the long face many people put on, when they are told they need to create metadata.

We would like to at least reduce this effort, by letting users create a metadata template, which would then be reused across the project, enabling the automated population of metadata. Having the repetitive bits out of the way, they could focus on the fun parts: creating specific layer metadata, and of course, working with the data.

More specifically, this WP covers the support to two events:

• Filling of the template, which would then be associated to the project; this can happen in one tab of the project settings.
• Automated population of metadata for a layer, based on this template; this can be triggered through the layer properties, or when the user loads/creates a layer.

The mockups bellow illustrate these application scenarios.

This template would be based on the QGIS internal schema, developed on WP1. The fields presented on the following mockups are only examples, based on the Dublin Core schema.

One interesting enhancement would be to support the import/export of this template, so that it could be shared across an organization. One user could also have multiple templates, according to the layers he was working on (see image bellow). Both these scenarios would require detaching the template from the project file and storing it in an external format.

We envision this WP to deliver the following:

• UI and handlers for creating the template.
• UI and handlers for applying the template.
• UI and handlers for exporting/importing the template (optional).

I will submit a proposal for these developments to the QGIS Grant Applications Programme and will be looking forward to having the support of the community to ease the creation of metadata in QGIS