Why bother with metadata? Well, I'm hoping it started to become obvious that there's some real advantages to having it. From a data producer point of view, if you're someone that's creating data, then things like staff turnover can have big effects. What I mean by that is, so imagine you're somebody that was hired by a company and you create a lot of data, or you got data from other sources, but you didn't document any of it, that you didn't create any metadata. Then, if there's any staff turnover, if you quit, or you get sick, or whatever, you get promoted lots of reasons why that may happen, then the person that comes into replace you, doesn't know what to do with that data. They've no way of evaluating that data. They don't know when it was created, or who created it, or why, or any of the things that metadata can help you with. That can end up costing a lot of time and effort. Either they may not use the data at all, which would be a big shame if you spent a lot of time on it, or they may not exists and go and buy data and spend money on something that they already have. So, it's really a bad situation to be in is that, if you don't have documentation of this staff, then nobody knows what's there or what it's worth and so that causes a lot of problems. Conversely, if you do have metadata it can increase efficiency is that imagine in a good scenario where you get promoted, you move on to another position. The person that comes in to replace you says, ''All the metadata is there.'' They literally just pick up where you left off and there's been no time wasted and they know exactly what they have and what to use it for. So, this enables data discovery. The more that data can be found easily and by more people, the more it'll get used, and the more data gets used, the more value it has. Another way to think of it is, if you create a dataset and then no one ever uses it, then what value does it really have? But, if a lot of people are using it, then really it has more value. As a data user, metadata is important to avoid duplication of efforts. What I mean by that is that, if you are wanting to make a map and you're looking for a dataset and you can't find it, then you may have to go and spend time and money creating that data in order to use it. If the metadata had been there and you were able to find it, you would save that time and that money and not have to duplicate the effort that was required to create that data in the first place. It's often said that 80% of GIS implementation costs is related to data acquisition and geo-processing. This is one of these things that get said, they're thrown around all the time. I honestly have no idea whether it's true or not. So, why am I telling you this now and replicating this GIS cliche if you want. The reason that this gets said a lot I think and the reason I'm telling you this now is just to emphasize the fact that collecting or creating data is usually really time-consuming and often quite expensive. The more you can avoid having to create data, the more time and money you can save and that's a good thing. So that's really what that little thing at the bottom there is. Who knows whether it's actually 80%, I'm sure it's changed over time with data collection methods and different instruments that are available. But the main thing I want to get you to remember about this is that, if you have good metadata, it's easy to find data, is more efficient, and you don't have to go collect or create data that already exists. So, I hope that you see by the end of this section that we're in now that metadata is at least in my mind boring yet very useful. Nobody, I don't think most people are really that keen on filling out form after form after form. Every time they create a new dataset to say what the purpose was and all this stuff about metadata, it's pretty tedious process. But, as soon as you're creating a map or you're working on a mapping project and you're looking for data, suddenly, metadata becomes incredibly interesting because you want that metadata to exist. It's really frustrating when you're looking for a dataset especially if it's something more obscure, unusual, and you can't find it or you do find it, but you don't really know where it came from or why it's there. Then, you don't really know if you can use it or not, and then that can really undermine the entire project, as you don't know how good your final map will be and if you're presenting that to your boss or to a client or whatever it may be, that makes a big difference in terms of how confident you are in the results in the mapping work that you did. All that time and effort you put into the design and everything else is undermined if you don't have good metadata, and you're not really sure how good that data is, you really don't know how good the map is.
