Add Support for Shapefile Metadata

[jprouty]

We'd like to add metadata to our shapefile.

From qQIS/ArcGIS, we are able to save information such as Description (Short Name, Title, Abstract, Keywords, URL), Attribution, Properties.

Does this already exist? I couldn't find anything from a quick cursory glance at code and issue tracker.

[micahcochran]

Short answer: No, metadata isn't currently supported.

pyshp is a very simple library.

It would be fairly easy to write into a preformatted xml template. Does that accomplish what you want?

Making it more robust and this feature gets quite a bit more complicated and will add quite a bit of code. Would you also want pyshp to be able to read metadata, too?

On QGIS, were you using the metatools plugin?

[jprouty]

Hi Micah,

Thanks for the quick reply!

Injecting XML would be manageable for us. I'm pretty new to shapefiles; are there any tutorials or pointers on how to do this?

We are just using the properties directly on the shape file in QGIS when working with the shapefile layer. Maybe it's a plugin? But I didn't have to install anything. Double click the layer, and then there's a metadata section in recent versions of QGIS.

[omad]

arcpy_metadata is a Python package that claims to be able to read and write ESRI compatible shapefile metadata. I haven't used it, and don't know if QGIS supports the same format.

Looks like a good place to start for anyone stuck on this.