Managing imperfect temporal metadata in the Catalog services of Spatial Data Infrastructures compliant with INSPIRE

In this paper we analyze the limitations of current recommendations of the INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) Directive as far as the temporal metadata definition for discovery purposes, and propose its extension so as to allow the representation and management of imperfect spatiotemporal metadata. We propose to extend the metadata in order to cope with the requirements of both metadata producers, who often are unable to specify precise values, and users who submit queries to catalog services for discovering interesting data, who may express soft selection conditions on metadata values. The proposal is illustrated and explained through an example taken from an active Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI).