It's easy to view and edit metadata for a feature class inside ArcMap. So, let's see how that works. All I have to do, is right-click on the feature class I'm interested in, so in this case these are wards from the City of Toronto open data, collection and I select data, view item description. What that's doing is it's actually pulling up the metadata that is stored inside that data set, which has information about that actual dataset. When I look at this, what's happening here is that there's not a lot of metadata that's been populated already, that's not uncommon when you're getting datasets from various sources. So, there's not much here in terms of a summary or description, there is some stuff in terms of things like the extent of the data sets, so it's telling us in east, west, north, south in longitude and latitude, what the bounding box of that dataset is in other words, how far is the geographic extent of that dataset. I scroll down, you can see some other things, there's the presentation formats, there's some basic stuff in terms of the processing environment that was used to create it. We have more information on the coordinate system, the spatial reference, so this was actually created in NAD_27, which is an older datum for the geographic coordinate system which is GCS there. You'll see that it's actually using something called the MTM_10 which is a modified Transverse Mercator with this particular zone and that's a system that the City of Toronto likes to use for various datasets, it's a bit of a pain to use, it can't be converted into other ones like Universal Transverse Mercator which is a little more common. But you shouldn't be freaked out if you see something like that, sometimes data comes in formats of datums, that you may not be familiar with and the main thing is really that you're just able to convert it from one to another if you need to. Continuing on, if we look at some of the other things we have available here in our metadata, I won't go through all of it, you can see for example, the fact that the geometry type is polygon. There's a geoprocessing history in terms of when it was created, and from what the fact that it was originally in a shape file. Then there's a list of the fields, the fields in the attribute table and so on. So, it's pretty basic not a lot there, but that will give you the basic metadata or whatever happens to be associated with that particular dataset. If you want to, you can edit that metadata and add to it. All you have to do is click the "Edit" button here, and then you can work on any of these things you want, so for tags, I could include things like Toronto and wards, whatever politics and so on, it can be anything that you want. The summary I can type in something like, ward boundaries for City of Toronto, suddenly became very important. It's what happens when you hit the caps or caps key by mistake. Now, I will go through to much more of this, but you get the idea, you can add description credits. Now, why would you want to add all this in? It may be that you want to use it for yourself, so that you can remember later what, when this was created, who created it and by whom, it could be that you want to use it for your organization and make it more clear to them, who created it or maybe you plan on sharing that data with people from other agencies or the general public even. So when that data goes out into the big wide world, It'd be nice to have that metadata associated with it, so that when somebody else opens it up they're able to look at that metadata and it will help them to evaluate that data things like who created it, when did they created it, why did they create it and so on. So, it's very useful to have metadata from data that you're getting from other sources and when you're creating data or even updating it from datasets that you got from somewhere else, if you can enhance that metadata that it's adding value to that dataset. I can click "Save" here, to save the changes I made to the metadata and close that. So, that's now associated with that dataset and if I open up that words data in another map document the metadata will go along with it. So, lets little overview, I just wanted to show you how you can access the metadata inside of ArcMap, that it tries to populate those metadata fields as much as it can automatically but there's certain things that you'd have to fill in yourself if you want to add that extra value to your dataset.
