Description of scientific metadata at the Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute (BAW)

The Federal Waterways Engineering and Research Institute acts as a consultant for and supports the Federal Ministry of Digital and Transport (BMDV) and the Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration (WSV) in navigation-related water engineering tasks. It creates and uses large volumes of scientific data like digital elevation models, simulation results, monitoring data, etc. as part of these activities. The description of this data with metadata is an essential prerequisite for its long-term storage, publication, retrieval and reuse. The requirements for metadata management were implemented with the INGRID software. INGRID offers various interfaces for capturing and processing metadata. It behaves format-agnostic, so different metadata formats can be processed.

The requirements for metadata processing at BAW are quite extensive and differ from the possibilities of usual geodata portals. As a result, custom fields and data classes have been defined in the metadata model. The ISO19139 metadata is used for transferring metadata to external geodata portals. A DOI data record can be generated from the metadata, which can in perspective also be registered automatically at datacite.org. To ensure the description of simulation results with metadata, the delivery of metadata together with data is firmly established in the workflows for data archival and publication.

The presentation describes the requirements for metadata processing, the basic structure of the application, and discusses the life cycle of metadata.