Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Towards 3D Metadata for Discovering
3D Geospatial Models
Alborz Zamyadi, Jacynthe Pouliot and Yvan Bédard
Abstract
Accessing 3D geospatial models, eventually at no cost and technical
restriction, is an important issue among the user communities. However, many
of the data infrastructures which try to provide access to 3D geospatial data have
been originally initiated for publishing 2D resources. To estimate the ability of
geo-portals for dissemination of 3D data, metadata, which is usually the foun-
dation of data discovery, is a key component. An inventory on eight geo-portals
and commercial websites shows that the metadata which refers to 3D information
is very different from one portal to another and among the similar 3D resources
in the same portal. The inventory covers more than 900 datasets whose meta-
data is affiliated with elevation. Three of the inventoried portals do not consider
3D model by any definition. The rest refer to 3D models by different and propri-
etary concepts and definitions causing confusion and misinterpretation. Motivated
to help users with discovering the appropriate 3D geospatial models they
need, this research project questions the shortcomings of the current metadata.
Correspondingly, it offers to improve the integrity of explicit 3D information in a
proposed 3D metadata. The main structure of the proposal comprises 21 genuine
metadata classes categorized with regard to the accessibility (contextual and struc-
tural) and availability aspects of 3D geospatial data. The proposed 3D metadata
is compared with the metadata schema of the Discovery Portal of the Canadian
Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI) which partially conforms to North
American Profile (NAP) of ISO-19115. The comparison analyzes both metadata
A. Zamyadi (
*
) · J. Pouliot · Y. Bédard
Université Laval, Quebec, Canada
e-mail: alborz.zamyadi.1@ulaval.ca
J. Pouliot
e-mail: jacynthe.pouliot@scg.ulaval.ca
Y. Bédard
e-mail: yvan.bedard@scg.ulaval.ca
