When I recently confronted my colleagues at work and asked them why metadata is important, I received a mixture of groans and laughter. At least the topic left no one indifferent.

So what is metadata and why the strong reaction? Metadata is data that describes the definition, structure, and administration of other data files. It is, quite literally, data about data. Creating detailed metadata has a reputation as a difficult and painstaking process that requires numerous workers toiling long into the night. However, I’ve worked with a lot of data over the years and I thought I knew different.

To my mind, metadata is an essential part of analysis. Sure, it may be difficult to produce good metadata, but it is so valuable when done right. I decided to dig a little deeper and found a metadata champion to back me up – Fugro EarthData’s mapping specialist, Larry Lund. He’s an expert in data analysis and interpretation and he relies upon accurate metadata everyday. “First of all, you can’t import data into a GIS tool without knowing the projection and coordinate system information and that’s part of standard metadata.” He said, adding, “You may also need to know when this data was captured or its resolution and accuracy – interpreters need that information. It just saves everybody a lot of time”.

I think he’s right. Metadata also documents the origin of data or the production techniques that produced it, essential information for any type of geospatial data analysis. That’s why detailed metadata is at the center of every GeoSAR delivery.

As for the idea that metadata seems hard to produce, it turns out that GeoSAR’s metadata production process is actually a highly-automated program that crawls the network and analyzes the individual files that make up a data delivery. The programming routine performs actions such as “count the number of pixels” or “determine post-spacing”. Once the routine has extracted the information, GeoSAR easily produces FGDC compliant metadata in a variety of formats and delivers it along with binary data.

Now if I could just get some help with spreadsheet macros.