Positive Feedback Service Portal for Metadata

A few days ago the ‘Service Portal for Metadata' has celebrated its 3rd month anniversary. On this occasion DELPHI IMM GmbH has welcomed numerous geodata suppliers and users of the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) Berlin/Brandenburg, Germany, as well as business partners and interested parties to the very heart of Potsdam.

Heinrich Tilly, President of the Landesvermessung und Geobasisinformation Brandenburg (LGB) held the opening keynote speech by sending a clear message to the attendees of the venue: „Make use of your metadata to create trust and transparency for the availability and interoperability of your geoinformation!". Besides, Tilly invited the key geoinformation service providers and public authorities of Berlin and Brandenburg to exploit the growth potential of the existent Spatial Data Infrastructure by bundling their forces and strengthening the variety of strong and loyal business cooperation's already realized.

„For this reason we are very happy about the close cooperation with the LGB. It enables us to provide a reliable and freely available 24-hour software solution for the administration of the region Berlin/Brandenburg and the regional service providers to capture, to collect, to validate and to publish metainformation of their geodata, geo services and geo applications", states Dr. Rolf Lessing, Managing Director of DELPHI IMM. The intense use of the Service Portal for Metadata during its launch period already proves that the requirements of municipalities and regional government authorities as well as representatives of the private sector and scientific institutions can be met at high technical standards within one web application.

Mirko Holzmeier, expert of the GeoServiceCenter of the LGB is very positive about the implementation of the Service Portal for Metadata: "Today the portal already provides access to 40 registered users, while about 400 datasets and services have been captured with the metadata editor ProMIS-Online. As professional contact person and administrator we are proud to present that 120 of these metadata documents are already available for the Spatial Data Infrastructure Germany and INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe). This is certainly a result we did not anticipate in such a short period of time." Above all, the training and consulting opportunities organized by the LGB are to gain increasing acceptance. Thus, 60 participants have attended the workshops on metadata. „However, experiences have shown that the common implementation of the web application in the whole of Berlin/Brandenburg still does require many efforts!", Mirko Holzmeier shows respect facing this demanding task, yet he is confident.

Over thirty representatives of the regional SDI, energy and environmental sector attended the event, which had interesting reports and lively discussions about future challenges and issues for SDI developments. The participants unanimously agreed to continue events of this character with the aim to communicate both technical and professional achievements and to track undeveloped service capacities. Finally, there is a broad consensus that the strong collaboration between the regional economy and public sector is the central hub for the advanced regional developments in the field of metadata management and web services. In this way, Berlin and Brandenburg give a vital impulse meant to inspire other German federal states.

The next Workshop on Metadata is scheduled for January 2011 in Potsdam.