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ISO 19115/19139

This standard is recommended for all discovery metadata.

ISO 19115

The ISO 19115 standards family describes metadata geographic for geographic information. ISO 19115 is an abstract standard, defining an information model only.

It consists of several parts/revisions (listed here in chronological order):

  • ISO 19115:2003 - original standard, unofficially termed ISO 19115-0
  • ISO 19115-2:2009 - extension to original standard, adding acquisition and processing related concepts

BAS has purchased copies of these standards. BAS staff can contact the UK PDC for more information.

There are newer versions of, and significant revisions to, these standards: ISO 19115-1:2014, ISO 19115-2:2019 and ISO 19115-3:2019. These standards will be adopted in due course.

ISO 19139

The ISO 19139 standards family describes how to encode 19115 information models using XML. ISO 19139 is a standard encoding, consisting of schemas, schematrons and transformations.

It consists of several parts/revisions (listed here in chronological order):

  • ISO 19139:2007 - encoding of ISO 19115:2003 in XML
  • ISO 19139-2:2012 - encoding of ISO 19115-2:2009 in XML

BAS has purchased copies of these standards. BAS staff can contact UK PDC for more information.

There is a newer version of, and significant revision to, this standard: ISO 19139:2016. This standard will be adopted in due course.

Profiles

There are various profiles for the ISO 19115 standards family that constrain its use for interoperability within various initiatives.

Profiles are not currently supported for this standard.

Vocabularies

The ISO 19115 standards family uses controlled vocabularies for two concepts:

  • code lists
  • descriptive keywords

Code lists

Wherever possible, code lists defined by ISO for the 19915:2003 standard are used.

However in some cases, code lists defined by ISO for the ISO 19115-1:2014 are used instead. This is only used where deemed necessary, such as to include ‘released’ dates for data embargo’s, which otherwise cannot be expressed using the ISO 19915:2003 code lists.

Descriptive keywords

Records should include terms from these vocabularies:

In preparation for (re-)supporting the EU INSPIRE profile, it is recommended to include terms from these vocabularies:

Extensions

Extensions are not currently supported for this standard.

Validation

The ISO 19115 standards family uses two methods for checking records comply with the standard:

In addition, there are JSON Schemas for this standard for use in the BAS Metadata Library.

XSD schemas

Constructing a complete validation/dependency chain for these schemas is quite difficult. A set of resolved schemas is available from the BAS Metadata Library. These schemas use relative imports and a single version of the GML and GMD schemas.

The BAS Metadata Library can be used to validate records against these schemas.

Schematrons

XML stylesheets

ISO XML to HTML

The ISO 19115 to HTML stylesheet, from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), presents metadata in a more readable form than raw XML. This stylesheet is useful for reviewing the contents, rather than technical structure of an XML record.

This stylesheet supports both the ISO 19115:2003 and ISO 19115-2:2009 standards, when encoded using ISO 19139:2007 and ISO 19139-2:2012.

A copy of this stylesheet is available from this website at:

https://metadata-standards.data.bas.ac.uk/static/xml-stylesheets/iso-html/xml-to-html-ISO.xsl

ISO 19139:2007 rubric

The SpiralTracker report stylesheet, from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), assesses the quality of a metadata record in various areas.

This stylesheet supports both the ISO 19115:2003 and ISO 19115-2:2009 standards, when encoded using ISO 19139:2007 and ISO 19139-2:2012.

A copy of this stylesheet is available from this website at:

https://metadata-standards.data.bas.ac.uk/static/xml-stylesheets/iso-rubric/isoRubricHTML.xsl