During the summer, a metadata patch was promised for ArcGIS Desktop 10. The fixes that were to be provided with this patch were incorporated into Service Pack 3. They address many important issues relating to metadata. While the focus centers on improving support for creating FGDC CSDGM metadata, the fixes cover all aspects of metadata in ArcGIS and apply to all metadata styles. Anyone who works with metadata should download and install this service pack at their earliest convenience.
In the ArcGIS metadata editor, support for handling dates was greatly improved. Support was also added for editing temporal and vertical extents, references to related resources, times associated with dates, and several other metadata concepts. Metadata content is now organized in the same manner when it is displayed and edited—headings in the display correspond to pages in the editor. Issues were fixed in how metadata is updated automatically, and how metadata geoprocessing tools handle geodatabase items. Improvements were made in how metadata is upgraded from, imported from, and exported to the FGDC CSDGM XML format. Also, a new XSLT-based translator is provided that exports ArcGIS metadata to the ISO 19139 XML format, ARCGIS2ISO19139.xml; it corrects some issues that can’t be fixed in the existing translator. Scripts and models should transition to using the new ArcGIS to ISO 19139 translator. In all, 73 metadata fixes were included in Service Pack 3.
Several metadata Help topics have now been updated in the ArcGIS Desktop 10 Resource Center to reflect the improvements provided with Service Pack 3. These Help updates are not included in the Service Pack 3 installation. Some new topics have also been added.
The following topics apply to everyone who works with metadata:
Key information about working with FGDC CSDGM metadata in ArcGIS 10 has been centralized in the topics The ArcGIS metadata format and Creating and managing FGDC metadata. And, a new help topic will guide you through the process of creating complete FGDC CSDGM metadata content in ArcGIS 10:
Also, topics that compare the metadata geoprocessing tools and explain when to use one tool rather than another for exporting, importing, and validating are now included in the table of contents with the rest of the metadata topics. These topics were previously only available as concepts associated with the Metadata toolset in the Conversion toolbox.
The ArcGIS Metadata Toolkit is now publicly available. The documentation provided with this toolkit explains how to create and share custom metadata styles. Customizations that change how you view, validate, and export metadata, and reduce the number of pages available in the ArcGIS metadata editor require no programming. The documentation walks you through the process of creating a custom page and adding it into the ArcGIS metadata editor. Also, complete source code for the pages provided with the ArcGIS metadata editor are available, if you want to modify the contents of dropdown lists or the elements available on one of the pages provided with ArcGIS Desktop.
Content provide by Aleta (Metadata Team)
