are there tools for converting from ISO 19115 to EML?

[mbjones]

The following question came into Slack from Chris Turner:

Hello DataONE folks. I'm curious what work you're aware of or have to map between ISO 19115(-1, -2, -3) and EML. The annual IOOS Code Sprint is happening next month, and one of the proposed topics of work is to develop such a mapping from an ISO record into EML. While recognizing that a comprehensive bijective mapping between the two standards isn't possible, it would be extremely useful to the IOOS and MBON communities to have an effective one way mapping. Most of the IOOS data comes from offices and labs that have processes for writing ISO. With a somewhat recent IOOS push to better handle more of their biological data, there's a focus on Darwin Core, and the EML needed for DwC Archive packages. Before we make our own attempt at this, it would be interesting and very helpful to know what you've all likely figured out already. Thanks in advance for whatever lessons you can share.

[mbjones]

hey @christurner — a few resources that I know of:

• there is a limited XSLT stylesheet doing a translation (https://github.com/NCEAS/iso2eml); incomplete, but could be expanded
• The geometa R package has some capability: https://github.com/eblondel/geometa (see in particular: https://github.com/eblondel/geometa/wiki#43-convert-metadata-objects-fromto-other-metadata-languages-mapping)
• Various other crosswalks have been done, some of which were accurate, some not as much. I don’t have my finger on those, but might be able to track some of them down
• MetaDIG has done a metadata quality assessment comparison of dialects (including EML, ISO, DataCite, and others), and so has assessment checks that work against both ISO and EML, showing the cross-walked paths between the standards. See https://github.com/NCEAS/metadig-checks/

The last one for MetaDIG is the basis for our cross-dialect metadata comparisons, and is a little hard to parse because the correspondence between document XPaths is embedded in each atomic check definition. The could be extracted, though, as they are in a machine-readable format. For example, here’s the bounding box check showing where in EML and ISO one might look for bounding box information: https://github.com/NCEAS/metadig-checks/blob/main/src/checks/bounding.coordinates.xml