ESRI s GIS Portal Toolkit isa technology and services solution for implementing local,

regional, national, and global spatial data infrastructure (SDI) portals. GIS portals organize

content and services such as directories, search tools, community information, support

resources, data, and applications. They providecapabilities to querymetadata records for

relevant data and services, thenlink directly to the online sites that host content services.

The content can be visualized as maps and usedin geographic queries and analyses. Portals

can also control commercial usage of services.

Metadata is the fuel for GIS Portal Toolkit and should, therefore, be optimized for use with

GIS Portal Toolkit. The objective of this document is to outline the steps for creating

metadata that works with GIS Portal Toolkit and allows users of the GIS portal to get the

most benefits of this metadata.