Metadata has always been essential to finding, understanding, and using geospatial data. But what we ask of metadata is changing. Data now moves across more systems, standards, and communities, while data spaces and AI are placing new demands on how data is described, accessed, evaluated, and trusted.
These questions brought more than 60 participants from 39 organizations to the OGC Metadata Summit in Bolzano/Bozen, Italy, on September 7–8, 2026, with another 70-plus participants from more than 60 organizations joining online. Over two days of presentations, demonstrations, and working sessions, several clear priorities emerged.
Key outcomes from Bolzano
- Build a better evidence base on metadata users. Data providers often have limited information about who actually consumes their metadata and how. We need to better understand real users and uses rather than designing primarily around assumptions.
- Support both people and machines. People need metadata that helps them quickly discover, understand, and evaluate data. Automated systems need more structured information—including schemas, identifiers, provenance, licensing, and reliable access information—that allows them to interpret and act on it.
- Treat metadata as part of the data lifecycle. Metadata should be created and maintained alongside the data, rather than added primarily at publication. This can preserve important information about provenance, quality, rights, and how data changes over time.
- Make different standards and approaches work better together. ISO-based metadata, DCAT, STAC, domain-specific profiles, and other approaches will continue to coexist. The priority is not to replace them with a single model, but to improve interoperability between them.
- Make implementation easier. Better tooling, examples, validation, governance, implementation guidance, open access, and multilingual resources can help close the gap between defining metadata standards and successfully putting them to work.
A detailed, session-by-session summary of the Summit and its outcomes is available here: OGC Metadata Summit 2026
All presentations from the Bolzano Metadata Summit are also available here: Bolzano Metadata Summit presentations.
From discovery to use
Not every user needs the same amount of metadata. Someone searching for data may only need a few essential details to decide whether a dataset is relevant, while someone—or an automated system—trying to use that data may need much more information about its structure, quality, provenance, licensing, and access.
One idea discussed in Bolzano was to think of these as a “business card” and a “full CV.” The business card provides a simple, consistent set of information for finding and evaluating data. From there, users and machines can access the full CV when they need the richer metadata required to understand and use it. This could make metadata simpler at the point of discovery without sacrificing the detail needed for more advanced uses.
This becomes increasingly important as machines become metadata users. Demonstrations at the Summit showed that AI agents worked more reliably with structured APIs and formats such as GeoJSON and JSON-LD than when trying to interpret information from HTML pages. The implication is not that metadata should be redesigned for AI, but that machine users now need to be considered alongside human users.
The discussions also reinforced that many interoperability problems occur at the boundaries between standards rather than within them. Mappings, legacy conversions, inconsistent identifiers, and links between metadata and underlying data assets remain common sources of friction. Quality, provenance, and licensing present similar challenges when information exists but cannot be consistently interpreted or compared across systems.
Building on what already exists
OGC Building Blocks generated significant interest in Bolzano as one way to address these issues without creating another universal metadata model. Building Blocks allow schemas, semantic definitions, examples, validation rules, and transformations to be assembled as smaller, reusable components. Communities can build on existing standards and profiles while adding their own requirements.
The discussions also raised questions that need further work, particularly around governance, registration, versioning, and conformance. OGC will continue that work, alongside efforts to make Building Blocks and other metadata approaches easier to understand and implement.
From Bolzano to Ottawa
Bolzano gave us a clearer picture of the challenge. The next step is to move from understanding the problems toward what we can do about them.
OGC will bring the community together again in Ottawa, Canada, on November 4–5, 2026. The second OGC Metadata Summit will build directly on Bolzano while looking more closely at how metadata supports AI-ready data; how provenance, quality, and licensing can become more machine-actionable; how organizations maintain governance and sovereignty as data moves across systems; and how existing standards and emerging approaches can work together.
This points to a broader shift in how we think about metadata. Metadata remains essential for catalogs, compliance, and discovery, but it is increasingly part of the infrastructure that allows people and machines to determine what data exists, what it means, where it came from, whether it can be trusted, and how it can be used.
There will not be one metadata model or standard that solves all of these problems. The opportunity is to make the pieces work together.
That is where we will pick up the conversation in Ottawa.
OGC Metadata Summit — Ottawa
November 4–5, 2026
Learn more about the OGC Metadata Summit in Ottawa
