Towards the quick establishment of metadata for natural disaster data sharing framework

Natural disaster related applications require a variety of data collected by different agencies for making correct decisions. Especially during and after natural hazards strike, a tremendous volume of data may be continuously established in a very short period of time and need to be quickly distributed to responsible agencies for making accurate estimation and strategies. A highly collaborative framework that effectively and efficiently enables the resource sharing between different agencies is therefore desperately necessary. The establishment of metadata has been a major bottleneck impeding the successful sharing because its entry requires professional knowledge about both the georesource and metadata, and this process is often long and tedious. This is especially disadvantageous for the natural disaster related missions because metadata is critical for users to quickly find the available georesource and correctly interpret and use the georesource. We adopt the metadata template approach in this paper to demonstrate its superior capability for reducing the required time and cost of metadata establishment and in the meantime ensure the professional requirements of metadata contents can be met. For the four major types of natural disaster data analyzed, the metadata template can "automatically" and "successfully" fill in 91%-96% of the metadata elements, which leaves only a limited number of non-template metadata elements to be manually input. Because metadata templates are designed by domain experts beforehand, they can tremendously improve the efficiency of metadata establishment process. A mandatory task for an ideal sharing framework is to allow all georesources to be found, distributed and used by anyone, our research demonstrates metadata template is the key technology to make this infrastructure goal possible.