How is metadata compliance encouraged in organizations like a large city or a state in which responsibility for spatial data is distributed among a range of agencies?
Most of the motivation for compliance come after the problem has become large. An organization with a relatively large staff will often come to the conclusion that metadata would be beneficial when it starts to forget what its data is. Most of the time there is a contract or a proposal that can be used to deduce relevant information but often there is data within the database tables that is lost because its meaning can no longer be remembered or you will spend time on the phone or in the hallway with colleagues trying to remember who did the watershed modeling that your boundaries are based on.
