Metadata in Pro vs Online vs Enterprise

[GarthHoxsie-Quinn]

I recently came across the following storymap about best practices for authoritative data and am curious about something with metadata. If sharing something from Arc Pro to Online or Enterprise, when is it best to create the metadata? Many times I have found that metadata from Pro does not always transfer to online so I wonder if it makes more sense to do the metadata online instead. 

[JordanDuft]

Hi @GarthHoxsie-Quinn !

We should consider and manage metadata in a comprehensive way by first reflecting on our data management workflows. Data management should drive metadata management, so it depends. Metadata should be tightly coupled with the data. When data changes, metadata changes. When data moves, metadata moves.

If the data maintained and edited in ArcGIS Pro, this is where the metadata should be edited and maintained to reflect the current state of the data.

If you publish a web layer to ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise the metadata should flow! If there are examples, where you are not seeing this happen we would like to know. Please reach out! However, now the question is how should metadata be maintained..

There are two publishing patterns that impact both data and metadata (copying vs referencing the data source).

• When we publish to ArcGIS Online the data is copied, and is now hosted in ArcGIS Online, and so is the metadata.
• What would happen if we were to go back and edit the metadata of that original data source in ArcGIS Pro? -We wouldn't see the web layer metadata update, because it no longer has a connection there, similar to the data.

We now have metadata for the original data source, that we would maintain in ArcGIS Pro, but we would also have metadata for the web layer.

• When we publish to ArcGIS Enterprise, it gets interesting, as we now have options.
  • When we publish to ArcGIS Enterprise, we can, like ArcGIS Online, copy the data and the metadata.
  • OR we can reference the data and metadata in place. The data is maintained in its original location, data store (folder, egdb) and so is the metadata.

If we reference the data in place, the metadata can only be maintained at the data source -so in this case we would maintain the metadata using ArcGIS Pro.

In ArcGIS Pro you can actually edit the metadata of the web layer in ArcGIS Online and Enterprise.

I would be interested in learning more about your workflows! If you wouldn't mind us reaching out, send us an email. Thanks!  askArcGISOpenPlatformPM@esri.com