Hi everyone;
As I mentioned at the last Technical Committee Meeting, I recently re-discovered a handy tool that Ken (Miistakis' GIS Programmer / all-around genius) developed a while ago, and I thought I would share it with you.
If you download GIS data from the internet, you will frequently see metadata published in html format (here's an example) that is not readable/importable to ESRI ArcCatalog. Your only option if you wish to attach this metadata to your downloaded spatial data is to either copy & paste data from the html file into your metadata editor, or to re-write the metadata from scratch. If you have never done either of these things, just trust me when I say that they're not very palatable options.
Lucky for us, Ken has created this tool for more or less automatically converting web-published html metadata files to ESRI-readable xml format.*
Here is a link to the Miistakis ftp site, from which you can download the tool:
ftp://goliath.rockies.ca/public/greg/RGISBlog
Please copy the zip file into a new folder, and follow the instructions that Ken has laid out in the handy "convert html files help.txt" documentation file.
I hope you all find this as useful as I have (especially those of you working on web-based resources for the RSDF). I'm sure Ken would appreciate feedback if you try the tool and have any questions or comments.
Have a good day,
greg
* The tool only works on html files created using "mp" - see Ken's help file for more details.
