Assisted Generation and Publication of Geospatial Data and Metadata

Today, the existence of metadata is one of the most important keys for an effective discovery of geospatial data published in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). However, due to lack of efficient mechanisms, integrated in user daily workflow, to assist users in generating metadata, little metadata is produced. This paper presents a mechanism for generating and publishing metadata with a Publication Service. This mechanism is provided as a web service implemented with a standard-base interface, the Web Processing Service (WPS) specification to improve its interoperability with other SDI components. This paper extends previous research when designing a Publication Service in the framework of the European Directive INSPIRE as a solution to assist users in publishing geospatial data and metadata automatically in order to improve, among others, SDI maintenance and usability.