The State Cartographer’s Office has just finished the autumn leg of its Wisconsin Metadata Workshop tour. Workshops were recently held at UW-LaCrosse, UW-Stevens Point and Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa Community College near Hayward.
Metadata documentation, as a practice, has risen in priority in recent years in the face of increasing data management needs, regional application development, disaster preparedness, and increasing user community awareness.
Our workshops are subsidized by a Federal Geographic Data Committee grant and focus on creating metadata to meet the state and federal metadata standard. This should improve the ability to share and compare data documentation leading to more informed geospatial data use and better interoperability for data consumers.
Overall reaction from participants has been very favorable toward our current metadata workshop content and format. Particular positive feedback has come for the hands-on exercises, attendee discussion, and distributed hardcopy reference materials in the form of a binder and CD-ROM. We have customized the focus and discussion topics based on registration questions submitted by attendees prior to individual workshops.
We are currently planning our spring and summer set of workshops in areas of the state not yet visited. Information on dates and locations for these workshops should be available on the Wisconsin Land Information Clearinghouse (WISCLINC) website in December. Feel free to contact the SCO to express interest in having a workshop in your area.
More information: Clearinghouse Metadata Training Announce Page
More information: Wisconsin Clearinghouse (metadata repository) Homepage