A method to produce metadata describing and assessing the quality of spatial landmark datasets in mountain area

Abstract. The increase of recreational activities in the mountains and a growing amount of websites proposing geographic data, offer new opportunities for societal needs such as mountain rescue, biodiversity monitoring, outdoor activities. However, the main issue with the websites data is the lack of metadata that minimizes its reuse outside the community that produced the data. The goal of this paper is to study and generate quality and descriptive metadata using ISO standards. To this end, we propose a method based on a common vocabulary such as an ontology and a data matching process. The first one allows to associate to each type of feature from an available geographic dataset an ontology class that will facilitate data matching, reproducibility of results and minimize semantic heterogeneity. The second one allows to define matching links between features representing the same entity in the real world and compute quality indicators based on the validated links. Finally, at the end of this process, we are able to generate descriptive and quality metadata. By following ISO standards and using the QualityML dictionary for measures, the metadata is serialized to XML and can finally be published as open source. Our approach was applied to five different landmark datasets in the French Alps region. New insights were acquired regarding positional accuracy and semantic granularity.