In recent years much of the research in the area of Geographic Information Systems has centred on the documentation of cartographic databases. The increasing volume of information available in both the public and private sectors has created the need to know the characteristics of the cartographic databases in order to permit access to and more efficient use of these databases. This information constitutes the metadata.
Various national and international organisations have developed a number of different metadata standards (some pre-normative).
The normalization of GeMM and its evolution to GeM+
The MiraMon Metadata Manager borrows the structure of the contents of the ENV 12657 metadata pre-standard of the Comité Européen de Normalisation and the American CSDGM metadata standard of the Federal Geographic Data Committee, adapting it to the MiraMon REL file format.
For a metadata set to conform to the CEN norms, it must include all the Types, Entities and attributes defined as obligatory in Annex A of Geographic Information - Data description - Metadata.
The structure in sections of the GeM+ is the same as that proposed by the CEN except for the THEMATIC INFORMATION (INFORMACIÓ TEMŔTICA), which is based entirely on the American standard, and DATA DESCRIPTION, an optional section according to the CEN that was considered unnecessary for GeMM in the proposed form.
The technical specifications for the MiraMon Metadata Manager (v.1.0) (Gestor de Metadatos de MiraMon (v.1.0) ) were developed during 1999-2000 by the Department of Geography of the Autonomous University of Barcelona on behalf of the Environment Department of the Generalitat (Regional Government) of Catalonia. The resulting first version of the GeMM document was, therefore, a theoretical compendium of the different standards existing at that date. The basic structure is based of the CEN standard and it conforms to this standard and the American one.
The MiraMon Metadata Manager is the first implementation of these technical specifications. GeMM is a support module of MiraMon (MSA) that allows the creation, visualisation and editing of the metadata of a specified cartographic database.
See a table comparing the GeMM, CEN and FGDC standards
From 2021 GeMM disappears and becomes the Universal Geospatial Metadata and Database Relationships Manager (GeM+) version 1.0 by becoming a metadata editor in XML according to ISO 19115 and ISO 19139 standards.