Review Comment 2

Hello NASA Standards Process Group,

In response to the request for comment on the ECHO Metadata Model, our team at ESRI has reviewed the ECHO metadata model and has comments to contribute. The ECHO standard itself already has a prominent user base, and we’re sure that user base will provide valuable feedback for the Implementation & Operational Suitability. Thus, our response is not on the construct of the standard but about exposing the metadata as a service.

Our team develops the ESRI Geoportal Extension that provides a solution for discovery of and access to geospatial resources. One of our goals is to support open standards such as CSW for the discovery and retrieval of resource metadata. We see great value in organizations creating ECHO-based metadata, and continuing to expose it through open protocols such as CSW.

Our recommendation is that, because the ECHO metadata profile is being mapped to core elements of ISO 19115 (ESDS-RFC-020v0.05, p2), organizations providing ECHO metadata should expose the metadata using an ISO-compliant CSW implementation. Being ISO compliant will allow for the metadata catalogs to be more visible and integratable to contexts outside their native domain. This fosters interoperability and encourages data sharing while maintaining the ability to directly query elements defined in the ECHO profile.

Please feel free to contact our team as you continue to refine the standard or if you are interested in seeing examples of geoportals that implement ISO-based profiles. This issue is of interest to our team, as we are always studying real world use cases for how to best facilitate data access and sharing.

Best Regards,