Biology - Biological Informatics Program
Standards for Data and MetadataStandards form the core of nearly every activity within biological informatics. Standards are critical within the discipline in order to:
The USGS Biological Informatics Program has led or co-led the development of several data and metadata standards, and has implemented other, existing standards for biological, geospatial, and informatics disciplines. We are committed to the implementation and dissemination of peer-reviewed, common standards within the community to improve the quality and quantity of interoperable information systems used for natural resources decision-making.
Data and Metadata Standards Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata The Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) is an interagency committee that promotes the development, use, sharing, and dissemination of geospatial data on a national basis. The FGDC has developed geospatial data standards for implementation of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), a virtual network of national geographic data resources. Resources are described on the NSDI network, Geodata.gov, using the Federal Geographic Data Committee Content Standard for Geospatial Metadata. The NBII Program was instrumental in the development of the Biological Data Profile, an extension to the FGDC Metadata Standard that allows biologists to use the standard to describe specific, biological attributes of their data. The NBII Program also manages the FGDC Clearinghouse for biological and ecological metadata. NBII provides extensive training on the FGDC Metadata Standard and the Biological Data Profile to biologists and data managers at federal, state, university, non-profit, and international agencies. Darwin Core The Darwin Core is a metadata standard for describing biological specimens in museum collections; it is also used for observational data (where an organism is observed and the observation recorded, but a specimen is not collected). A specimen metadata record includes taxonomic information to identify the species and the individual specimen; geographic and geospatial data about the location at which the specimen was collected; information regarding the methods used to preserve the specimen; and other important elements. The Darwin Core is the metadata standard used by the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), an international effort currently focused on the digitalization of natural history collections around the world, and the development of a catalogue of names of known organisms. The NBII Program is the official "U.S. hub" for GBIF, and serves as the focal point for metadata about specimens housed in U.S. museum collections; these metadata records are, in turn, harvested by GBIF to make them available to the worldwide community. Dublin Core The Dublin Core is an internationally-recognized, open source metadata standard that can be used to describe a wide variety of both physical and digital objects within any discipline of knowledge. Dublin Core consists of a comparatively simple schema that is easily extensible for the specific metadata needs of a given discipline. While the Biological Informatics Office implements the FGDC Metadata Standard with the Biological Data Profile to describe all datasets and geospatial data layers housed within our programs, we formally implemented the Dublin Core standard in 2002 to describe other kinds of electronically available resources provided or indexed by our programs. Providing this metadata serves two key purposes: it provides users with a context for selecting resources to access from our program Web sites; and it facilitates precise search and retrieval of resources relevant to a particular data or information need. More information on our use of Dublin Core is available in the Metadata area of the NBII Web site.
Terminology Standards Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) The Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) is the official USGS standard for species scientific names. ITIS provides credible, peer-reviewed classifications for species, as well as valid names, known synonyms, and known common names. All species information provided by the USGS Biological Informatics Program's component programs utilize ITIS. The Biological Informatics Program manages ITIS. NBII-CSA Biocomplexity Thesaurus The NBII, a component of the Biological Informatics Program, partnered with CSA, a leading bibliographic database provider, to develop the Biocomplexity Thesaurus. A freely accessible resource, the Biocomplexity Thesaurus serves as the controlled vocabulary for the NBII, facilitating improved access and retrieval of data and information relevant to users' queries. The NBII is also working closely with our partners in the European Environment Agency (EEA) on a prototype to provide multi-lingual searching capabilities to both NBII, EEA, and other global resources through semantic interoperability between the Biocomplexity Thesaurus and the Generalized Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GeMET).
Geospatial Standards Geospatial Interoperability Framework (GIF) The NBII and the Gap Analysis Program utilize the Geospatial Interoperability Framework (GIF), a suite of open-source standards and services developed by the Biological Informatics Office to promote the open sharing of data layers. The Framework:
|
||
| USGS Home :: Geology :: Geography :: Water | ||
U.S. Department of the Interior |
U.S. Geological Survey
