NASA's Earth Science Division (ESD) International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 19115 Geographic Metadata Standard - Implementation Requirement and Guidance document describes the ESD-approved implementation guidelines for required metadata to be included in science data products. The metadata requirements represented in this document provide a means of assuring the consistency of data requirements across subsystems and supporting the data standardization necessary for system interoperability. The document lists the relevant ISO standards to be used to describe science data products. Complete descriptions of NASA collections and products will require elements from all of these ISO standards.

Links to the ISO Implementation Requirement and Guidance document, user resources for ISO metadata, NASA's Common Metadata Repository (CMR), and NASA's Unified Metadata Model (UMM) on which CMR is based, are provided below. NASA conventions and best practices using ISO 19115 are currently under development, but a wealth of user resources are available.

Status

ISO 19115 implementation guidelines were approved for use in NASA's Earth Science Data Systems and published here in December 2014. The current document, ISO 19115 Geographic Metadata Standard - Implementation Requirement and Guidance, was approved in July 2018. This document is maintained by the ESDIS Standards Coordination Office (ESCO), and is under configuration control in the Configuration Management EOSDIS Tool (COMET).

NASA employees and those supporting NASA projects can obtain official ISO documentation at no cost via NASA's Technical Standards Program. You will need a NASA Agency User ID and password to access the Standards site. For those who don't have an Agency User ID, please email Sara H. Lubkin at Sara H. Lubkin@nasa.gov.

Please email comments on the metadata requirements specification to the ESCO staff at esco-staff@lists.nasa.gov.