Strategies for Infusing ISO 19115 Metadata in Earth Science Data Systems

A major effort on the part of the NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) project is the development of metadata that enables greater data interoperability among scientific data sets regardless of source or application. The International Standards Organization (ISO) metadata standards, specifically those in the ISO 19000 series, are currently emerging as the primary means to represent metadata associated with Geographic Information in Earth Science Data Products. This talk will focus on strategies to infuse some of the ISO 19000 series metadata into Earth Science Data Products. Part of the infusion requires development of tools that will enable ISO metadata to be generated for NASA data products, and then integration of these tools into a developing Science Data System. We will cover the use of ISO 19139 (Geographic Informatio--Metadata--XML Schema Implementation), along with XML Data Binding to generate APIs for ISO 19115 (Geographic Information--Metadata) in multiple languages. Different file representations of ISO 19115 encodings in data products will also be covered, including representations with HDF5. Other approaches, based on transforms, will be covered as a way to encode data product-specific variations of ISO 19139.