Politics, law and economics

A semantic standard developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, AgMES enables description, resource discovery, interoperability and data exchange of different types of information resources in all areas relevant to food production, nutrition and rural development.

The standard is maintained by AIMS (Agricultural Information Management Standards), and while it has been used in various application profiles, it is now deprecated for new uses and will no longer be updated.

A metadata standard drawing on Dublin Core and AgMES created specifically to enhance the description, exchange and subsequent retrieval of agricultural Document-Like Information Objects.

A profile of ISO 19115, also mapping to the AGLS profile of Dublin Core, designed to facilitate efficient access to descriptions of information resources, particularly geographic or spatial data.

Describes the format of the generic metadata artifacts—the templates, elements, and instances—that make up the CEDAR metadata framework and allow for exchange of the metadata artifacts with external systems.

The CESSDA Metadata Model contains metadata elements, their definitions and information on other requirements, such as repeatability. The Model is built from the viewpoint of quantitative (social science) data and is based on DDI Lifecycle 3.2 metadata standard.

A well-established standard file structure for the archiving and distribution of crystallographic information, CIF is in regular use for reporting crystal structure determinations to Acta Crystallographica and other journals.

Sponsored by the International Union of Crystallography, the current standard dates from 1997. As of July 2011, a new version of the CIF standard is under consideration.

A study-data oriented model, primarily in support of the ICAT data managment infrastructure software. The CSMD is designed to support data collected within a large-scale facility’s scientific workflow; however the model is also designed to be generic across scientific disciplines.

Sponsored by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council, the latest full specification available is v 4.0, from 2013.

A body of standards, including a glossary of terms (in other contexts these might be called properties, elements, fields, columns, attributes, or concepts) intended to facilitate the sharing of information about biological diversity by providing reference definitions, examples, and commentaries.

Sponsored by Biodiversity Information Standards (TWDG), the current standard was last modified in October 2009.

A protocol-independent XML schema for a geospatial extension to the Darwin Core.

A widely used, international standard for describing data from the social, behavioral, and economic sciences. Two versions of the standard are currently maintained in parallel:

  • DDI Codebook (or DDI version 2) is the simpler of the two, and intended for documenting simple survey data for exchange or archiving. Version 2.5 was released in January 2012.
  • DDI Lifecycle (or DDI version 3) is richer and may be used to document datasets at each stage of their lifecycle from conceptualization through to publication and reuse. It is modular and extensible. Version 3.2 was published in March 2014.

Both versions are XML-based and defined using XML Schemas. They were developed and are maintained by the DDI Alliance.

An early metadata initiative from the Earth sciences community, intended for the description of scientific data sets. It includes elements focusing on instruments that capture data, temporal and spatial characteristics of the data, and projects with which the dataset is associated. It is defined as a W3C XML Schema.

Sponsored by the Global Change Master Directory, the DIF Writer's Guide Version 6 is from November 2010.

EngMeta is an XML-based formal definition of information necessary to find, understand, reproduce and reuse data from engineering disciplines. The schema was defined together with engineers from aerodynamics and thermodynamics and lies a focus on computational engineering, but is general enough to cover other engineering disciplines.

EngMeta defines metadata-fields for the description of the components of the observed system (object of research), the observed variables, the spatial and temporal resolution of the observation and the steps taken in the research process to generate, process, analyse and visualize the data. It is based on existing standards like DataCite, PREMIS, CodeMeta and ExptML and is implemented as two metadata blocks for repositories based on the open-source repository platform Dataverse.

A widely-used, but no longer current standard defining the information content for a set of digital geospatial data required by the US Federal Government.

CSDGM was sponsored by the US Federal Geographic Data Committee.  However, in September 2010 the FGDC endorsed ISO 19115 and began encouraging federal agencies to transition to ISO metadata.

An extension of SDMX used to exchange statistical data and metadata.

A profile of ISO 19115:2003, adopted in 2007 as the common metadata standard for the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE). The other profiles of ISO 19115 in use in European Member States have been made compliant with INSPIRE.

The Investigation/Study/Assay (ISA) tab-delimited (TAB) format is a general purpose framework with which to collect and communicate complex metadata (i.e. sample characteristics, technologies used, type of measurements made) from 'omics-based' experiments employing a combination of technologies.

Created by core developers from the University of Oxford, ISA-TAB v1.0 was released in November 2008.

An extension of ISA-TAB specifying the format for representing and sharing information about nanomaterials, small molecules and biological specimens along with their assay characterization data.

An internationally-adopted schema for describing geographic information and services. It provides information about the identification, the extent, the quality, the spatial and temporal schema, spatial reference, and distribution of digital geographic data.

Sponsored by the International Standards Organisation, the first edition of ISO 19115 was published in 2003. It has since been split into parts: ISO 19115-1:2014 contains the fundamentals of the standard; ISO 19115-2:2009 contains extensions for imagery and gridded data; and ISO/TS 19115-3:2016 provides an XML schema implementation for the fundamental concepts compatible with ISO/TS 19138:2007 (Geographic Metadata XML, or GMD).

A common profile of ISO19115:2003 between the United States and Canada, designed to enhance interoperability of geographic information metadata in North America.

An extension of ISO 19115 defining the schema required for describing imagery and gridded data.

LIDO is an XML schema intended for delivering metadata, for use in a variety of online services, from an organization’s online collections database to portals of aggregated resources, as well as exposing, sharing, and connecting data on the web. Its strength lies in its ability to support the typical range of descriptive information about objects of material culture. It can be used for all kinds of objects, e.g., art, architecture, cultural history, history of technology, and natural history. LIDO supports multilingual application environments. Being an application of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), LIDO is the result of a collaborative effort of international stakeholders in the museum sector, starting in 2008, to create a common solution for contributing cultural heritage content to portals and other repositories of aggregated resources. LIDO is maintained under the patronage of CIDOC - ICOM International Committee for Documentation.

A common portal to a group of nearly 40 checklists of Minimum Information for various biological disciplines. The MIBBI Foundry is developing a cross-analysis of these guidelines to create an intercompatible, extensible community of standards.

The concept was realized initially through the joint efforts of the Proteomics Standards Initiative, the Genomic Standards Consortium and the MGED RSBI Working Groups. The latest project to register with MIBBI is the MIABie guidelines for reporting biofilm research, as of January 2012.

NeXus is an international standard for the storage and exchange of neutron, x-ray, and muon experiment data. The structure of NeXus files is extremely flexible, allowing the storage of both simple data sets, such as a single data array and its axes, and highly complex data and their associated metadata, such as measurements on a multi-component instrument or numerical simulations. NeXus is built on top of the container format HDF5, and adds domain-specific rules for organizing data within HDF5 files in addition to a dictionary of well-defined domain-specific field names.

Some repositories have decided that current standards do not fit their metadata needs, and so have created their own requirements.

A set of common technical and statistical standards and guidelines to be used for the efficient exchange and sharing of statistical data and metadata.

Sponsoring institutions include BIS, ECB, EUROSTAT, IMF, OECD, UN, and the World Bank. Technical Specification 2.1 was amended in May 2012.

A profile of ISO 19115 designed to support the documentation and discovery of spatial datasets, dataset series and geo services within Higher and Further Education.

A specification for a set of metadata elements describing geospatial data resources for discovery purposes, based on ISO 19115.