CIMIC Geospatial Metadata Server

Center for Infomration Management, Integration and Connectivity (CIMIC) at Rutgers University at Newark established a metadata server for geographic datasets such as shape files, vector files and satellite image files. The purpose of the data bank is to allow producers of geographic data to describe what datasets they have available and to allow users of Geographic Information Systems to find the datasets they need. The academic researchers, state and local government officials and K-12 educators are expected to benefit from the geographic datasets for scientific studies, decision making and education purposes, respectively.

The geospatial metadata server provides three functionalities:

• Populating Geographic data bank using a subset of the Federal Geographic Data Committee Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata. Metadata is information about data and the FGDC standard specifies what should be contained in a metadata record for geospatial datasets. It includes such things as authors of the data, the geographic area covered, the dataset category or theme, scale, data file information, how to obtain the dataset, etc.
• Searching the data bank for specific geographic datasets that users are interested in. The complete FGDC compliant metadata record for each dataset can then be viewed, so that the user can determine if the dataset is what they are looking for. Information about obtaining the dataset can be found in the Distribution Information Section of the meta data.
• Browsing the data bank to view all the currently available datasets from our geographic data server.