2001 National Report for Japan

Recent Activity Report on Metadata and SDI in Japan

AKENO Kazuhiko

akeno@gsi.go.jp

Geographical Survey Institute

Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport

Kitasato-1, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki-ken, 305-0811, Japan.

1. Establishment of NSDI

A Liaison Committee of Ministries and Agencies Concerned with GIS (LCMACG) was established in September 1995 to promote efficient development and effective utilization of GIS within the Government under close cooperation between Ministries and Agencies. The Cabinet Councilor’s Office, Cabinet Secretariat, is designated as the secretariat of the Liaison Committee with assistance from the Geographical Survey Institute (GSI) and National Land Information Office, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.

In 1996 the Liaison Committee developed a long-term plan for the development of NSDI in Japan. The plan specifies actions to be taken by the Government from 1996 to 2001 such as development of digital geographic data, establishment of clearinghouse, standardisation. The plan will be reviewed and the next long-term plan will be discussed in LCMACG this year.

2. Standardisation Activities

GSI has been developed “Japanese National Standards for Geographic Information” (JNSGI) with private companies from 1996. JNSGI is basically based on draft of ISO19100 series standards.

JNSGI was adopted as the first edition “technical” geographic information standard within the Government by LCMACG in March 1999.

GSI and companies is revising JNSGI and examine those implementations. As a result of the implementations, GSI is preparing to distribute its nation-wide framework dataset based on XML-encoding (ISO19118) next year and already has distributed some sample datasets through the Internet for testing in March 2001.

3. Metadata

Metadata was standardised as a part of JNSGI. For clearinghouse, Japan Metadata Profile (JMP) was developed. Those are is almost compliant with the first CD of ISO 19115. The differences are listed below:

Changing order of address notation to meet Japanese custom;
Adding elements for designating extensional character code set in distribution information (in Japan, extensional code sets are occasionally needed for specific fields).

Since ISO19115 reaches almost DIS stage, GSI and private companies has just stated revising Metadata standard and JMP.

4. Clearinghouse Implementation

In 1999, GSI opened its clearinghouse that is able to handle Japanese code set (multi-byte). After two years, based on agreement of LCMACG, Ministries and Agencies prepared their metadata in the form of JMP and set up clearinghouse nodes in March 2001. Those metadata are accessible from the clearinghouse gateway by GSI. Presently there are eight nodes by government and two nodes by non-profit organization. Universities and private companies are preparing to set up their node and to join the gateway.

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