Using standardized metadata to improve the search and analysis of remote sensing data for change detection

The awareness about the changes occurred in our living earth has received a tremendous attention from a variety of research and application domains. For such missions, it is advantageous to take full advantages of the abundant geospatial data available in sharing environment. The diverse types and overwhelming volume of available georesource, however, impedes such expectations. This paper focuses on the use of RS data to aid change detection. A set of metadata elements from ISO19115 are selected and their searching and usage strategies are developed. The standardized metadata helps to improve the searching efficiency by adding constraints for intelligently filtering data that matches the characteristics of the reference RS data. It also facilitates the sharing of information collected by different organizations to improve the precision and accuracy of the analyzed results, and guides RS data providers to supply all the necessary information to the analyzers to aid decision making.