The SouthWest Colorado Data Center (SWDC) is pleased to present our final report to you for the work we did from September of 98 thru September 99. All in all the project was a great success and has increased the awareness and implementation of metadata practices throughout Colorado and Utah.

Originally SWDC was intending to serve our metadata on the Utah NSDI node at the Automated Geographic Reference Center (AGRC). Instead, we installed our own node at SWDC and registered it with the FGDC. This is currently the first and only registered node in the State of Colorado. We made our metadata compliant with the FGDC metadata standard and learned a lot about how to do this. We realized that a lot of the data we were serving came from other sources and that to get accurate metadata we had to get the entities that created the data to create their own metadata. This started a lot of action that we had not really anticipated. In our previous efforts to start a clearing house in Colorado we had learned that the process of getting people to provide metadata is not the easiest task around. We tried all the tools that we could find to create metadata and finally decided that we would like to offer a tool that would be easy to use over the Internet. Doug Nebert had a basic tool that accomplished this, but it did not quite have all the functionality we wanted. We discovered that the EROS data center and the New York Library had some really friendly people that had developed some great tools so we picked their brains, borrowed their base code, and came up with the tool we call EZMeta. EZMeta allows people, over the Internet, to fill out their metadata. This tool has quite a few additional fields beyond MetaLite. Once someone has filled out a metadata record the program parses it and places it on our ISITE node. It also emails a copy back to the authors for their own records. This has created yet more unanticipated actions.

• SWDC gave their oral report at the Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS) convention in Idlewild, California in the summer of 1999. We offered our node and EZMeta up for the use of the International Conservation community. We are now training people in how to use this throughout the world. At this conference we gave a two hour report on our project and then cooperated with Michelle Antony of the EROS Data Center in providing a workshop on metadata. Quite fun. I would expect that we will have quite a few of these International groups providing metadata in the coming years. This is mainly dependent on how much time we can continue to actively bring these groups along.
• We started, and continue, to work with the sovereign Indian nations throughout the Colorado Plateau. Currently we are mainly working with the Apache, the Southern Ute, the Navaho and the Hopi tribes. Our hope is to get the Indian nations familiar enough with the concepts of metadata that they will establish their own NSDI node. In the meantime we hope to serve as a bridge to this final product.
• SouthWest Data has participated in the formation of a group called GISCO (GIS Colorado). This is a group that was organized to coordinate data sharing efforts for the counties and towns of Colorado. We are hosting their web page and have made our NSDI node available for their use. We are no longer actively participating in this group because they limited their sharing to governmental entities and we feel that data sharing should be for everyone, across the board. We continue to offer access to our node because we want them to be part of the NSDI and we continue to host their web page. We also offer training to this group in the creation of metadata.
• The Colorado Ecosystem Partnership is a group of federal agencies in Colorado that would like to share data for the purpose of encouraging community-based stewardship at the ecosystem level. As such, they are very interested in metadata. We are currently using our node and our web based search tool, (more on this later), to develop a site for their data. They have also tasked us with attempting to bring the state agencies into this relationship.
• We also continue to work with the Western Governor’s Association in promoting the use of GIS and metadata as an integral part of their ENLIBRA policy. This is tricky for us because we have no official mandate from our governor to do this. However, someone from Colorado has to stay in the conversation so here we are. SWDC is actively participating in several pilot project in the states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona to promote the value of sharing this data. This is accomplished by our continued participation in the Canyon Country Partnership and the Colorado Plateau Data Sharing Committee groups.
• SWDC is working with several groups, CEP and GISCO, to stay in touch with the governor of Colorado to establish a needed state presence in the GIS field. Our hope is that eventually the state will take an appropriate role in clearinghouse activities. Until the state takes this role SWDC continues to build some of the base skeleton for a clearinghouse. We would welcome the state taking a leadership role in this and we look at our current role as providing a bridge to the final product. We stay in contact with the governor’s office of Innovation and Technology and we think they will begin to look at this issue in the next few months. In the meantime, progress is being made.

SouthWest Data has incorporated a metadata display tool that works with ESRI’s MapObjects software. This is a web based GIS tool that allows the viewer (client) to display and query various data and create their own maps. The legend on this program allows people to query for the metadata or download the data to their own computer. We found that by generating a unique value or name for each data set we could actually search the metadata through a NSDI node rather that referencing a static HTML metadata record. The idea we worked from was that someone could view and query the data to see if it was what they had in mind, and if they thought it was what they were looking for they could check the metadata to see further detail. We are incorporating this tool into the web site for the Colorado Ecosystem Partnership that we are developing to provide them with a clearinghouse for the federal data for Colorado.

We tried working with the schools in developing a curricula and met with little interest from them. We gave up on this portion of the grant, with the approval of the FGDC and transferred the funds to other portions of the project. Specifically, we used the money to acquire a computer to host the Isite software.

We learned a lot in this project.