Coweeta LTER's commitment to standards:
Coweeta LTER subscribes to the philosophy that
the future of scientific research is tied to the free and efficient
exchange of research and ideas within the scientific community. As
such, Coweeta LTER has invested heavily in supporting emerging worldwide
standards for both research and GIS metadata. Coweeta has chosen the
FGDC Geospatial Standards format for GIS data - an example of which is
provided
here...
About the Federal Geospatial
Data Committee (FGDC)
The Federal Geographic Data Committee is a 19 member interagency committee
composed of representatives from the Executive Office of the President,
Cabinet-level and independent agencies. The FGDC is developing the
National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) in cooperation with
organizations from State, local and tribal governments, the academic
community, and the private sector. The NSDI encompasses policies,
standards, and procedures for organizations to cooperatively produce and
share geographic data.
The FGDC
metadata standard is based upon the Dublin Core, the preeminent authority
today on the subject of
metadata.
About the Dublin Core
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) is an organization dedicated to
promoting the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards and
developing specialized metadata vocabularies for describing resources that
enable more intelligent information discovery systems.
The Dublin Core has become an important part of the emerging infrastructure of the Internet. Many communities are eager to adopt a common core of semantics for resource description, and the Dublin Core has attracted broad ranging international and interdisciplinary support for this purpose.
Sidenote: The 'Dublin' in Dublin Core is derived from the site of the original workshop for the Initiative, held in Dublin, Ohio in 1995.