Imagine that you collected geographic data in one schema and you want to provide it in some other schema. For many of us, this only happens pretty much all of the time.

For example, maybe your organization has an enterprise database which stores all the information that you have about recent, active faults. Now you want to provide that data as a WFS service with fields that conform to the ActiveFaults template being used by the AASG Geothermal Data System. Perhaps you store all your geologic map data in such a database and you want to convert it into FeatureClasses that fit into NCGMP09-style geodatabases.

Here's a nice way to convert your data formats in such a way that you only have to do it once. You can continue to make changes to your data just like you always have, and there will always be a featureclass hanging out there in the new schema which conveys the most up-to-date information that you have. The pre-requisites are:

Following is how we modified the Views Bonus Pack module for Drupal 6 to generate ISO 19139 XML metadata files for the USGIN Document Repository. This hack can be be used to relatively easily generate other XML metadata (FGDC, CSW records) or most complex XML. Ideally, this hack will evolve into a separate module. If you are interested or have questions, please participate in the Generate ISO 19139 metadata record XML files Views Bonus Pack issue thread.

Overview

The goal is to generate minimum ISO 19139 dataset metadata XML files (that conform to the USGIN profile) from the core and CCK fields used in the repository's Collection (ct_collection) and Document-like Information Object (DLIO, ct_dlio) content types.

Files: 

Patch for Views Bonus Pack 6.x-dev (CVS trunk)