Metadata play a key role to facilitate accessing to up-to-date spatial information and plays an important aspect in delivering high quality spatial information services to users. With huge amount of spatial information being generated, a spatial application must be sufficiently flexible to extract and update spatial metadata automatically. By contrast, in current applications, the extract and update process is undertaken manually, making changes to spatial metadata relatively more difficult and expensive.

This paper presents an approach for synchronising three critical components of metadata (standard, data model and metadata application) so that the process of updating or extracting spatial metadata – where feasible – becomes automatic. This approach distinguishes between already existing methods by emphasising on new technologies like Web 2.0 and Semantic Web. Within a metadata application, different approaches of data modelling including integrated spatial data and metadata model and dynamic metadata models, user generated tags and metadata standards will be presented and discussed.