Towards a Quantitative Evaluation of Geospatial Metadata Quality in the Context of Semantic Interoperability

Semantic interoperability is a process to facilitate the reuse of geospatial data in a distributed and heterogeneous environment. In this process, the provided geospatial metadata that are appropriate for the intended use may be incomplete or not appropriate for data reuse. Thus, the external quality (fitness for use) of these metadata seems important for data reuse, since it has the potential to protect reusers from the risk of misinterpreting geospatial data. In this paper, we aim to provide a step forward in making re-users aware of the quality of geospatial metadata. We introduce a set of indicators for geospatial metadata quality and we propose a method to evaluate them with respect to the context of re-users. Based on this evaluation, we derive warnings that indicate the degree of risk of data misinterpretation related to metadata quality in the context of semantic interoperability.