Metadata and the Avenue Programming Language: The Art of Scripting

Author: Melissa Ann Massaro
Organization: Centers for Disease Control/ATSDR

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This paper describes how Avenue programming language and Microsoft Access combine to provide a powerful solution to the GIS database tracking needs of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. The ArcView GIS Dialog Designer extension and Avenue allow for the development of an application for tracking the creation and updating of site boundaries of environmental concerns. It demonstrates how to automate the extraction of pertinent metadata such as the name, date of creation, and geographic extent of the geographic data file. Now the arduous task of logging metadata, as required by the Federal Geospatial Data Standard, is simplified down to a few mouse clicks and on-screen forms, which are uploaded to relational databases for internal quality control and Internet map server publication.