Metadata, licensing & provenance
The record that travels with the data: what it describes, who may use it, which version it is, and what produced it.
Metadata is the record that travels with a dataset, and it exists to answer four questions the geometry cannot: what does this describe, who may use it and how, which version is this, and what produced it.
None of the four survives a copy unless somebody wrote them down. A file with no licence cannot be republished, a file with no version cannot be compared with last month’s, and a file with no provenance cannot be defended when a number in it is challenged. The standards — ISO 19115, FGDC, STAC, DCAT — are mostly agreements about where to put those answers so that a machine can find them.
The pages below cover what each standard is for, how to write and read the records from Python, how to attach provenance to a pipeline output, and how to check a catalogue is telling the truth about its own contents.
🧭 Start with the concepts
The ideas the how-to guides below assume you already have.
- Spatial metadata explained: what a dataset must tell you
- Open data licences explained for spatial data
- Provenance and lineage explained for spatial workflows
- Dataset versioning explained
- Metadata standards compared: ISO 19115, STAC and Frictionless
- Attribution requirements explained: OpenStreetMap, Copernicus and national data
⚙️ Then do the task
Step-by-step walkthroughs with code you can copy and adapt.
- How to write a metadata record for a dataset in Python
- How to read the metadata already inside your spatial files
- How to embed provenance tags in a GeoTIFF
- How to store metadata inside a GeoPackage
- How to checksum spatial datasets so you can prove they match
- How to build a STAC item for your own raster
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🔧 When it breaks
The errors this topic produces, with the cause explained rather than just the command.
Learning paths through this topic
A curated route rather than a list — the guides in the order that builds on itself.
Related topics
Subjects that keep coming up alongside this one, most overlap first.