Finding and using Metadata in SDE V10

[MarkSmith]

Hello,

I'm new to looking at metadata, and would like to make use of the simple 'description' metadata which ArcCatalog allows you to create at V10 for layers in SDE.

Basically I can use ArcEditor to fill out the metadata summary, credits, description, tags etc and save, but I want to access this metadata and make use of it through web applications, probably via a stored procedure that queries the relevant tables in SDE to get the metadata for a layer.  I have been unable to discover where this information even gets stored in SDE (V10 on SQL Server), there is an SDE_Metadata table but this remains empty.  I have found other forum posts on accessing metadata for previous versions of SDE, but not 10, and I really don�??t want to use ArcIMS �?? I've just spent the last year migrating all our apps from IMS to AGS, so installing IMS just to use a metadata service seems a backwards step.

Can anyone please explain where this simple metadata gets stored in SDE and how I can retrieve it?
Thank you,

Mark.

[TravisVal]

Mark,

I would take a look in the DOCUMENTATION column in SDE.GDB_ITEMS table.

I would also suggest you look at the following documentation:
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisserver/10.0/help/arcgis_server_dotnet_help/index.html#/Browsing_geod...
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisserver/10.0/help/arcgis_server_dotnet_help/index.html#//009300001646...

�??The other XML columns in the system tables can be queried the same way as the Definition column of the GDB_Items table, but be aware that there is no geodatabase-defined XML schema for the Documentation column. The Documentation column stores the metadata associated with geodatabase items. However, the exact set of metadata elements it contains will vary between organizations based on the metadata standard they follow and their workflow for managing the information. An XML DTD describing the structure of ArcGIS metadata�??ArcGISmetadatav1.dtd�??is provided with ArcGIS Desktop in the \Metadata\Translator\Rules subfolder of the ArcGIS installation directory.�?�

Travis

[MarkSmith]

Travis,

Thank you for the quick reply and helpful suggestions, I'll take a look at it all as you suggest.

Thanks,

Mark.