Surviving the Transition from FGDC to ISO Metadata Standards

The NOAA Metadata Manager and Repository (NMMR) has served a well established group of data managers at NOAA's National Data Centers for over a decade. It provides a web interface for managing FGDC compliant metadata and publishing that metadata to several large data discovery systems (GeoSpatial One-Stop, NASA's Global Change Master Directory, the Comprehensive Large-Array data Stewardship System, and FirstGov). The Data Center's are now faced with migration of these metadata to new International Metadata Standards (ISO 19115, 19115-2, "). We would like to accomplish this migration while minimizing disruption to the current users and supporting significant new capabilities of the ISO standards. Our current approach involves relational ISO views on top of the existing XML database to convert FGDC content into ISO without changing the data manager interface. These views are the foundation for ISO- compliant XML metadata access via REST-like web services. Additionally, new database tables provide information required by ISO that is not included in the FGDC standard. This approach allows us to support the new standard without disrupting the current system.