## 7 Discussion and Conclusions  
What has been presented can be viewed as a holistic approach to metadata automation. Various data and metadata creation, update and management process steps have been decomposed and subsequently employed to contribute towards the automated generation of geospatial metadata records. Standardiseddata encoding and storage practices have been extended beyond their traditional use in facilitating data upkeep, location and query to provide tangible support to metadata authoring. Entities drawn from both a dataset's enveloping computing environment and its internal constituents contribute towards documentation efforts through a system of annotation that permits such objects to be consistently referenced via a custom utility. What remains is a limited number of elements that require manual processing prior to human mediated quality control. There nevertheless remains scope to further extend the current work. Demands for incorporating the socio-political context in which datasets are created and curated (as suggested by [PERSON] _et al._[43]) could be met by harvesting or linking to 'project-level' metadata such as that maintained within the Scottish Executive's GI Projects Index Registry3 (part of their 'One Scotland - One Geography' initiative). Treatment for experiential metadata suggested by the same study could further be accommodated via the inclusion of voice recognition technology within the host GIS to enable easy capture of user-centric data perspectives while it is being manipulated and in turn enrich the outcome of documentation. Similar provision could be included within surveying equipment to permit registering of erstwhile neglected information such as the environmental conditions at the instance of data capture, providing for more detailed data quality assessment at the feature level if later required. Footnote 3: [[http://www.gisprojects.net/](http://www.gisprojects.net/)]([http://www.gisprojects.net/](http://www.gisprojects.net/))  
Complete abstract entries could be approximated through the use of pre-composed sentence templates into which seed values may be inserted; whether this would act to discourage human input or complicate validation should be considered. Instantiating a reference boundary dataset library as an accessible Application Programming Interface (API) -driven web service meanwhile would avoid the need to bundle such layers within a custom utility and offer a single point of management when updates to boundary data are required. Further scope for exploiting dataset geometry may also exist through the development and application of pattern matching approaches; a catalogue of distinctive geographic features for instance could be used to extrapolate spatial reference details of data assets lacking such information through the cross-referencing of geographic footprints with those of known aspect. Potential for improvement may also exist where the underlying metadata standard is concerned. The _Frequency of update field_ for instance is employed to indicate the prescribed data maintenance period; dynamically binding this element with data update events would provide a more accurate reflection of management history, rather than an arbitrary frequency estimate that may or may not be adhered to. We would offer that the value of implementing a feature metadata schema goes farther than providing a more sophisticated means of data tracking. Indeed, the advent of feature-centric strategies such as multi-user corporate databases and Internet-enabled delivery mechanisms like WFS has witnessed an increase in the ability to remotely access the atomic components of data resources, rendering the need to retrieve host datasets in their entirety unnecessary. Associated efficiency gains (_i.e._, transport, processing) are nevertheless tempered by an uncertainty surrounding the pedigree of data thus retrieved, as conventional feature delivery approaches inconsistently depict the metadata of source collections.