Visual Analysis of Geographic Metadata in a Spatial Data Infrastructure

Nowadays the importance of collecting and sharing
geographical data is rapidly increasing. Spatial Data
Infrastructures are arising to integrate geographic
information services which allow to identify and
access geographic information from a wide range of
sources. The study of data access addresses different
issues such as data delivering, data retrieval, data
integration and data selection.
In this paper we focus on the data selection issue:
we describe an approach to support data selection
activity based on visual analysis of geographic
metadata. This facilitates the metadata analysis
providing a compact overview of data that are
available and a correct interpretation of the result set,
allowing to discover properties and relationship
among data and to formulate better searching criteria.