United States Department of Agriculture
Natural Resources Conservation Service		 National Cartography and Geospatial Center Go to Accessibility Information
Skip to Page Content




Geospatial Metadata Tool

The pages within this section are for USDA Employees Only.

The following application has been tested and is certified for use on ITS workstations running ArcGIS 8.3, 9.0, 9.1 and 9.2. The application is available through Team Services Website under the Supplemental Applications and Instructions library.

The Service Center Geospatial Data Management Team (GDMT) began developing a geospatial metadata standard in 1999. The standard establishes the minimum mandatory metadata elements that must be collected for all geospatial datasets created or distributed by the service center agencies. The document defines two levels of metadata required for geospatial metadata. The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) full compliance metadata are required for all national geospatial datasets, primarily those datasets created by the service center agencies to support national programs.

A paired-down version of the metadata, referred to as Service Center Initiative (SCI) minimum compliance metadata, is required for locally derived datasets and to support the aggregation of county and state datasets into national layers.

A number of tools are available for creating and maintaining FGDC full compliance metadata. The agencies have used text editors and word processing software for several years. The GIS enterprise licensing agreement with the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) provides ArcCatalog for this purpose.

The Geospatial Metadata Team, sponsored by the GDMT, has worked with ESRI to develop the USDA Metadata Tool for creating SCI minimum compliance metadata. This tool, along with PowerPoint slides, is available for downloading.

These documents require Adobe Acrobat.

USDA Metadata Documents
Document Name Format File Size Last Updated
SCA Metadata Policy Adobe Acrobat 52 KB October 15, 2003
USDA Metadata Tool User Manual Adobe Acrobat 785 KB October 18, 2007

*Warning: The USDA metadata tool is an ArcObjects application. The ArcGIS software will only permit one ArcObjects application to run at a time. Conflicts with FSA's CLU maintenance tool also developed using ArcObjects have been reported. Until this issue is resolved, do not attempt to use the metadata tool with other ArcObjects applications.

< Back to Tools

Last Modified: 05/05/2008