This document provides a general interview approach for
creating metadata. It is not necessarily exhaustive but is intended to convey in
plain language the basic information that will be contained in the metadata and
link to pages specifying the steps required to write that information into the
metadata document itself. Questions in italics indicate the topics and
are not to be answered explicitly; those that are in plain text, indented
beneath them are the questions that need to be answered.
Does the data set describe conditions during a particular time period?
Is this a digital map or remote-sensing image, or something different
like tabular data?
How does the data set represent geographic features?
How are geographic features stored in the data set?
What coordinate system is used to represent geographic features?
How does the data set describe geographic features?
What are the types of features present?
For each feature, what attributes of these features are described?
What sort of values does each attribute hold?
For measured attributes, what are the units of measure, resolution of
the measurements, frequency of the measurements in time, and estimated
accuracy of the measurements?
Has this metadata record been reviewed or will it be reviewed in the
future?
Who wrote the metadata?
To what standard are the metadata intended to conform?
If you specified any clock times in the metadata, did you use local
time, GMT, or something else?
Are there legal restrictions on who can get or use the metadata?
USGS Geologic Information This file is
<http://geology.usgs.gov/tools/metadata/tools/doc/ctc/> Maintained by
Peter Schweitzer Last updated
Thursday, 20-May-2004 16:35:02 EDT