Network for a European forest information service - developing a metadata schema as a collaborative action of data providers, users and system developers

This paper addresses the development of a metadata schema for forestry related information resources in the course of the Accompanying Measure project under the Quality of Life and Management of Living Resources Programme of the European Commission (QLK5-CT-2002-30638). It describes the use of metadata standards, and in particular that of the Dublin core metadata initiative. Quality in data description was one of the central issues. An approach to elaborating quality reporting within the schema is presented. The metadata standards need to be robust based on the principles of interoperability, technology independence, and be easily upgradeable. Promising examples at the current stage of interoperability technology are DCMI for catalogue functionality, and XML schema, Web-services, or also resource description framework schemas, for distributed database functionality.