Tool to validate metadata of EU's geographic information

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre just published it’s Inspire Metadata Validator, a tool to check if metadata in geographic information conforms to Inspire’s guidelines on metadata.

Inspire is a EU project to provide ways to share geographic and environmental information. It wants to facilitate public access to this data collected by governments, commercial and other organisations in the European Union. The project hopes to offer the combined spatial information from different sources across Europe.

Several software tools are built to assist in harmonising the information and to make sure the submitted data conforms to the project’s rules and guidelines.

The Inspire Metadata Validator is one of several tools published by the JRC to help with adding and using the geographic and environmental data. The tool specifically checks if metadata conforms to the 2008 Inspire Metadata Regulation. This rule specifies the elements that are needed for spatial services and sets of data.

Earlier the JRC made available a Inspire Metadata Editor, that can be used to create metadata suitable for the Inspire project.

The JRC’s validator is published as open source using the European Union Public Licence (EUPL).