Metadata for climate adaptation

Objective

The aim of the working group was to meet the climate adaptation actors' need for more uniform and easy-to-understand metadata and to enable increased searchability for geodata for climate adaptation by theme.

Working group

The group consisted of the Swedish Geological Survey, the Swedish Geotechnical Institute, the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency, Lantmäteriet, the County Administrative Boards and the Swedish National Property Agency with the support of Gitter Consult AB and MetaGIS AB. The project was run in 2020 with Lantmäteriet as the convening party and was financed by funds from SMHI.

Method and results from the project

to deepen the picture of needs and create consensus and make recommendations for further work, the project carried out the following investigations:

• Investigation of what support there is today for geodata producers in the development of metadata in accordance with the national metadata profile for geographical information, which standards and government assignments are based on the assignment and provide an assessment of the need for change to meet user needs.
• Examine, create consensus and produce recommendations for how existing support material could be supplemented/changed to metadata should become more uniform and easy to understand and how implementation should take place.
• Investigate and produce recommendations for how geodata for climate adaptation can be easier to search for climate adaptation actors.

An important part of the work has also been to carry out external monitoring, including ongoing work with national basic data and infrastructure for these, work with new infrastructure for geodata in the community building process and European work with revision of the Inspire Directive's metadata profile.

The project's focus has been on meeting the needs of climate adaptation actors and the climate adaptation sector, but the proposed solutions aim to be part of the national infrastructures for data and metadata and also be possible to apply in principle to other sectoral interests.

The solution proposal developed to meet the needs expressed by users can be divided into three main parts:

New metadata profile

A new version of the national metadata profile is proposed. It should both make it easier to publish simple metadata for a resource and provide the opportunity to enter more complete metadata that meets the user's needs. The new national metadata profile is proposed to support sector-specific extensions and keywords. For climate adaptation, this would mean that the metadata profile is extended with metadata elements to indicate how data can be used for climate adaptation purposes and how data should not be used. It also means that the use of keywords can create conditions for making it easier to search for and find relevant data, services and other resources such as method support and applications.

National editorial board for climate adaptation metadata

En It is proposed that a national metadata editorial board for climate adaptation be established. The task of the editorial staff is to supplement the metadata created by the data producer with sector-specific metadata concerning recommended use, discouraged use and classification by providing resources with relevant keywords from a climate adaptation point of view. By gathering expertise from several expert authorities in climate adaptation, conditions are created for producing harmonized, easy-to-understand and appropriate descriptions and classification via keywords of data and other resources.

Technical solutions

The technical solutions needed to support the national editorial staff as well as those needed to publish and present metadata for those working on climate adaptation can be divided into the following areas; Create and manage sector metadata, Publish metadata, Audience-adapted metadata presentation, Quality of metadata FAIR.

In summary

An introduction should take place step by step. However, some steps can be worked on and implemented in parallel. A proposal for an overall plan for implementation has been prepared and can be divided into three main tracks:

1. Establish a new metadata data profile and associated technical framework
2. Establish a national editorial board for climate adaptation metadata
3. Develop technical solutions

Take a look at the final report Metadata for climate adaptation (pdf, new window).

Contact project managers

To get in contact with those responsible for the project, you can email eva.uggla@lm.se or sven.vasseur@lm.se