ISO Standards are eligible for systematic revisions every five years. The revision process can be initiated by a single member voting in favor of a revision. The Principle ISO Metadata Standard (ISO 19115) was revised over the last several years and the result (ISO 19115-1) will soon be an new international standard replacing ISO 19115. NASA and NOAA participated in the revison process which resulted in consideration of their metadata requirements in the process. Many of the revisions included in ISO 19115-1 were suggested by NASA and NOAA. Some of the successes are described here.

Keyword Types

Keywords from shared vocabularies are critical for consistent data discovery interfaces. The NASA Global Change Master Directory has developed shared vocabularies that include consistent values for many important types of keywords. These vocabularies are used extensively throughout the GCMD community and are included in GCMD's Directory Interchange Format (DIF).

ISO 19115 includes a shared vocabulary (codelist) for keyword types that includes five values: discipline, place, stratum, temporal, and theme. This codelist was extended in ISO 19115-1 to include the GCMD keyword types and others: dataCentre, featureType, instrument, platform, project, service, product, subTopicCategory, taxon. This will allow direct translation of keywords from the GCMD metadata into ISO, greatly simplifying the translation and, more importantly, maintaining a consistent conceptual interface for those users as they begin to use ISO.