FGDC collaborates with several bodies in the development of geospatial standards.  FGDC works closely with the American National Standards Institute’s (ANSI) Technical Committee for Geographic Information Systems, InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS-L1).  INCITS-L1 is ANSI’s technical advisory group to the International Standardization Organization’s (ISO) Geospatial Standards Technical Committee (TC211).  FGDC through its association with ANSI is collaborating on the development of the U.S. National Profile.  The Profile will be a workbook with best metadata practices to implement ISO 19139 Geographic Information- Metadata- XML Schema Implementation.  ISO 19115, adopted by ANSI in December 2004, describes the general content of the metadata and relationships between metadata elements. It does not, however, provide any guidance on how the metadata records should be built and formatted. To address this need an additional standard, ISO 19139, was undertaken to create an XML schema that prescribes the format of the metadata record. The ISO 19139 standard incorporates metadata elements referenced, but not defined, in ISO 19115 such as the entity and attribute descriptions addressed by ISO 19109 geospatial data standard.  ISO 19139 provides an encoding schema for describing, validating, and exchanging metadata about geographic datasets, dataset series, individual geographic features, feature attributes, feature types, feature properties, etc. 

Work has begun within the U.S. Metadata Community to develop workbook content for the Profile with ISO 19115 and 19139 as the workbook’s foundation.  The workbook will be in development phase through early spring 2006.  During this time the metadata community is encouraged to participate. Contact Sharon Shin, the FGDC Metadata Coordinator to participate the U.S. endeavor. 

Once developed, the workbook will undergo review within the contributing community and then through ANSI and ISO processes.  This project is concurrent with the Canadian effort to develop their national profile.  The US and Canadian profiles, once approved by ISO, will be released on the same date and time with identical content thus creating a North American Metadata Profile.  The FGDC has sponsored development of a FGDC-to-ISO conversion tool based on the FGDC to ISO Crosswalk V.4.  The tool, still under development due to continued ISO 19139 development, will be made available to the community from the FGDC website.