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nvkelso / natural-earth-vector

A global, public domain map dataset available at three scales and featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data.
https://www.naturalearthdata.com/
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Add ISO 19139 metadata #267

Open nyalldawson opened 6 years ago

nyalldawson commented 6 years ago

Natural Earth files are distributed without structured metadata - just the version txt file and HTML readme.

They should ideally be distributed alongside standard ISO 19139 XML metadata files containing structured metadata for each layer.

nyalldawson commented 6 years ago

(Note: this is not a feature request - I'm going to look into implementing this myself. It's just a tracking ticket)

nvkelso commented 6 years ago

Neither myself or the other primary author of Natural Earth have a lot of enthusiasm for XML metadata for all these files, but tell me more...

Specifically we manage the files in QGIS – does it support this feature? And how would the metadata files be updated?

nyalldawson commented 6 years ago

Specifically we manage the files in QGIS – does it support this feature? And how would the metadata files be updated?

Short answer: in 3.x no, but it's planned. In 2.x: yes, via metatools plugin. But outside of QGIS there's wide support for IS19139/ISO19115 metadata.

I was thinking a template based approach would work well - so the XML is created from a template, with the version etc would be filled in via the make script. I think mostly the metadata would be static content.