ICSM ISO19115-1 Metadata Best Practice Guide

Spatial Representation Type ★★★★

In order to quickly find, categorise and evaluate the fitness of a resource to our needs it is useful to include in our metadata a high-level description of the type or format of spatial data the resource contains.

   
Element Name spatialRepresentationType
Parent MD_Metadata.identificationInfo>MD_Identification
Class/Type characterString
Governance Common ICSM, Domain
Purpose Discovery
Audience machine resource - ⭑ ⭑ ⭑
  general - ⭑ ⭑ ⭑ ⭑
  resource manager - ⭑ ⭑ ⭑ ⭑
  specialist - ⭑ ⭑ ⭑
Metadata type Structural
ICSM Level of Agreement ⭑ ⭑ ⭑

Definition

The method used by the resource to spatially represent geographic information.

ISO Obligation

Discussion

A resource may consist of many spatial representation types. It may also contain no spatial representation types. Most commonly, a geospatial resource will consist of a single representation type. The resource may be data or service, MD_DataIdentification or SV_ServiceIdentification.

ICSM Best Practice Recommendations

Therefore - If a resource contains spatial representations, to provide guidance to users, the type of spatial representation(s) should be captured using this element. Further Spatial representation details could be captured in the optional spatialRepresentationInfo package. At least one instance of this element should be populated in all metadata records describing spatial resources.

Values for this element must come from the MD_SpatialRepresentationTypeCode codelist.

Possible Values for spatialRepresentationType

From codelist - MD_SpatialRepresentationTypeCode

Also Consider

Crosswalk considerations

ISO19139

MD_DataIdentification/spatialRepresentationType moved from MD_DataIdentification to MD_Identification in order to allow their use for service identification. In practice, when creating metadata for data, this change is not noticeable.

Examples

XML -

<mdb:MD_Metadata>
....
 <mdb:identificationInfo>
  <mri:MD_DataIdentification>
  ....
   <mri:spatialRepresentationType>
    <mcc:MD_SpatialRepresentationTypeCode 
    codeList="https://schemas.isotc211.org/19115/resources/Codelist/cat
    /codelists.xml#MD_SpatialRepresentationTypeCode"
    codeListValue="vector"/>
   </mri:spatialRepresentationType>
  ....
  </mri:MD_DataIdentification>
 </mdb:identificationInfo>
....
</mdb:MD_Metadata>

UML diagrams

Recommended elements highlighted in yellow

spatialRepresentationType

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