Formal metadata: information and software

A collection of software tools, techniques, admonitions, and advice intended to help those involved in data management create, maintain, and evaluate proper documentation.

Software tools

Software that can help you create, validate, and maintain collections of metadata records that are stored as individual files.

Name Version Documentation
mp 2.9.50 A compiler for formal metadata

mp checks the structure of a metadata record against the FGDC standard, indicating discrepancies. It also re-expresses the metadata in several useful alternative formats.

cns 2.8.6 A pre-parser for formal metadata

cns is used in case a text metadata record appears to have correct element names but is in a format that cannot be parsed by mp. Usually the main problem to be corrected is inconsistent indentation, but cns corrects a variety of other conditions. Use with care.

xtme 2.7.26 An editor for formal metadata

For primitive installations of the X Window System in which Tcl/Tk is not available, xtme uses Athena widgets.

Tkme 3.0.5 Another editor for formal metadata

A versatile editing tool based on the Tcl/Tk toolkit. Tkme version 3 uses controlled vocabulary web services to help you choose keywords.

mq 2.6.31 A Tcl interface for formal metadata

Software interface that can be used to implement sophisticated editing operations on large, diverse collections of metadata records that are stored as separate files.

DBFmeta 1.14 A tool to help document DBF files

Reads the DBF file and creates a Detailed_Description that can be pasted in a metadata record using Tkme. This tool can be used to detect spelling errors or other consistency problems in the data file.

err2html 2.1.13 Make mp's error messages easier to read

Re-expresses the error listing generated by mp to reduce duplication, show most severe messages first, and show hypertext links for element names.

Download software

The software tools described here are included in downloadable packages; to install simply extract.

System Package Contents Size
Microsoft Windows mp-2.9.50.zip All programs, source code, documentation 5.3M
Microsoft Windows tkme.exe Tkme stand-alone runtime 2.3M
Linux (x64) bin_lnx.tar.gz All programs and documentation 1.5M
All src.tar.gz Source code and documentation 1.1M
All tkme.kit Tkme as a platform-independent starkit 1.3M

Tips, tricks, and advanced topics:
https://geology.usgs.gov/tools/metadata/
geology.usgs.gov
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-21
21510
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:AMHHJZLMJYNZWMZVIXBNBE6I6MGG33RD
<urn:uuid:7717c3a8-5a5e-45da-a8e6-17ec9600e56a>
2021-05-16T05:54:05Z
137.227.233.178
text/html
sha1:O62P2WDJPDK23I4OASK5O3CEHV5HRSP5
<urn:uuid:76aa5476-c9a5-4a24-b429-192b03874f65>
https://geology.usgs.gov/tools/metadata/
response
<urn:uuid:fa48e453-b94a-48c4-a0a0-bc1a6cb31b45>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-21
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-60.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/