Re: metadata development

Dara Olson wrote:
>
> Happy spring.
>
> I am new to postgres/postgis and am trying to figure out the best way
> to approach documenting metadata within postgres. Has there been
> anything developed to add FGDC or Dublin Core standard metadata
> records into postgres for each table within the database? Is there
> any program that can access postgres to insert metadata based on a
> standard or any other way to document metadata for a postgres
> database? Any help, suggestions or advice from prior experiences
> would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Dara
>
I'm curious how this would be useful. Why would you want to associate
that sort of information with tables as metadata? Dublin core is a
metadata standard for "information resources" like documents (Tile,
Creator, Publisher, Author, Rights, etc), and FGDC is Geographic data. I
can easily imagine wanting to store such information in your database
using actual tables, as information about "entities" represented in your
database schema, but I don't think attaching it as metadata to a table
is really an appropriate solution. But I don't understand the scenario
you have in mind, and perhaps you could explain the scenario where this
makes sense.

I suspect you are reaching for database metadata simply because these
standards are often described as metadata; but these are usages of the
word "metadata" in very different contexts. What is called metadata in
many contexts is simply becomes data from the context of using a
relational database to represent it.

Eric