Basic Elements and Implication of Software Metadata in the Intelligent Geospatial Web

During over decades, metadata on spatial data have been developed, and they have been widely applied at the national and international metadata standards such as file structure, format, and data model. However, in the web 2.0 paradigm toward user participation and openness, sources and contents of geospatial products are also diversified, not being limited to well-organized and structured data sets or databases. Especially, software products in both open source software and commercially packaged software are considered into important resources in the geospatial domain. But there are no reports or studies regarding software metadata from the side of software engineering or information technology, till now. The motivation of this study is based on practical needs to build search engine in the intelligent geospatial web. Brief review on current metadata standards is presented, and necessity for software metadata is discussed as well as related works. Basic elements, initially considered, of software metadata are presented. This work is the first attempt for software metadata, although it just covers geospatial software products. Further practical works to meet industrial demands need to actual applications of software metadata.