Generating Structured Metadata via the GeoCODES User Interface using Schema.org and the Project 418 Geoscience Extensions for Indexing by Commercial Search Engines

Using web standards including Schema.org and JSON-LD, the GeoCODES project extends Schema.org with Project 418's geoscience specific vocabulary. By embedding properly formatted and populated JSON-LD files in web sites serving geolocated datasets, search engines such as Google and Bing are able to parse and index these data sets and then to provide information concerning these datasets via standard web search tools. Due to the difficult nature of properly formatting and populating these JSON-LD structures, the GeoCODES User Interface was created to guide data providers through the process of describing the data and validating the descriptions against standard vocabularies. The result is user friendly and easily extensible web based, mobile device ready tool for automatically generating JSON-LD metadata for organizations and datasets. This ultimately allows the original data to be found and used by both scientists and the public.