If you don't know about metadata, you need to. Have you ever thought of how many separate informational items could be important to some aspect of an integrated water management plan? Think about the archived reports, datasets, photos, GIS layers and other material and then add to this all the information that will be developed in the decades to come for water supply, water quality, flood control, habitat restoration and more. Hundreds of thousands of separate informational resources will be available. Only with a database catalog of this information can a great deal of time and resources be saved.

Here are some examples of on-line catalogs:

• Sacramento River Portal
• California Environmental Information System (CERES)

Wolf and Associates works with open source software to build customized on-line catalogs and databases that meet state and federal standards for metadata and the clients specific needs. These web information systems can have browse, search, upload and edit features customized to help advance other objectives for the website. New fields can be added to the catalog to meet the needs of a specific project. Using metadata provides tremendous flexibility and long term value to the information. We use public domain, open source technologies such as Zope, MySQL, and Plone because they are very robust and provide cost effective solutions for our clients.

Metadata - The Key to Web Usability

Metadata is data about information. It includes the title, author, data, keywords, publisher, geographic location and other information that allows the record to be found. Metadata includes fields such as abstract/summary, document location, comments, and more that allows the information to be useful to others without having to have access to the full document. Meta tags are HTML source code that search engines and other databases use to index and more accurately retrieve documents from among the many others which have similar words. Metadata tags can also be used on your own website to index and locate content. This approach makes organizing and maintaining a complicated website a much more manageable task.

Wolf and Associates offers several tools and services to assist your organization in working with metadata. For example, we are partners in MetaPartner™, which is an MS Access database application that is customize to match the fields of the client's web catalog and can meet their other internal database base needs. It also helps with complex scheduling of website projects and can create metatags and dump content into customized html templates making the webmaster job a lot easier.