ABSTRACT
During recent years a lot of attention has been focused on developing spatial information infrastructures (SIIs). Metadata is a major component for searching data by a SII. In this chapter the broader context of metadata is addressed, and open points for further work are also mentioned. Because of the background of the authors, this chapter has a standardization viewpoint.*
Any organization providing information should disseminate data in a way that nonspecialized users can discover, evaluate and use. The basic strategy is searching
for words or phrases in the contents resources as a hit-or-miss strategy. When the spatial resource of interest has some word or phrase uniquely associated with it, this can be quite successful but mostly, hundreds or thousands of irrelevant “hits” may be returned, as anyone can confi rm who has spent frustrating hours searching for something whose name is a common word.
