ISO 19115/19139
This standards family is recommended for all discovery metadata.
A subset of this standards family is supported by the BAS Metadata Library.
ISO 19115
The ISO 19115 standards family describes geographic resources, such as datasets, products and services. 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 - base standard (unofficially termed ISO 19115-0 in this website)
ISO 19115-2:2009 - extension to base standard, adding acquisition and processing related concepts
BAS has purchased copies of these standards. Contact the UK PDC for more information.
There are successor parts/revisions to this standard under review (and not currently supported):
ISO 19115-1:2014 - successor to ISO 19115:2003
ISO 19115-2:2019 - successor to ISO 19115-2:2009
ISO 19139
The ISO 19139 standards family describes how to encode the 19115 information model using XML. ISO 19139 is a standard encoding, consisting of XML schemas, schematrons and transformations (XLSTs).
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. Contact the UK PDC for more information.
There are successor parts/revisions to these standard under review (and not currently supported):
ISO 19139-1:2019 - successor to 19139:2007
There are additional related parts to this standard under review (and not currently supported):
ISO 19115-3:2019
BAS has purchased copies of these standards. Contact the UK PDC for more information.
Profiles
There are various profiles for the ISO 19115 standards family that constrain its use for interoperability within various initiatives.
Examples of profiles defined by external organisations:
Profiles defined within BAS:
Vocabularies
The ISO 19115 standards family uses controlled vocabularies for two concepts:
code lists
descriptive keywords
Code lists
Code lists defined controlled lists of values for specific properties, such as date types (created, updated, etc.). ISO publish official code lists for both 19115:2003 and its successor 19115:2014:
BAS records use both these lists for different elements, as the latter are more expansive and provide critically needed values, such as 'released' for describing resource embargos.
Descriptive keywords
There are a number of descriptive keywords that can be used within records, including:
international or reigional vocabularies maintained by an external authority such as NASA
organisational vocabularies maintained locally such as BAS Research Topics
free-text, uncontrolled, terms specific to each resource
Keywords can describe a number of different aspects, such as topics, places, providers, etc.
Validation
The ISO 19115 standards family uses two methods for checking records comply with the standard:
XSD Schemas
XML Schema Definitions (XSDs) for ISO 19139:2007 are available from ISO at:https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/ISO_19139_Schemas/
The BAS Metadata Library can validate records against these schemas.
Constructing a complete validation/dependency chain for these schemas is quite difficult. A set of resolved schemas is available from, and used within, the BAS Metadata Library. These schemas are customised to use relative imports and a single version of the GML and GMD schemas.
Schematrons
XML Schematrons for ISO 19139:2007 are available from the Open Geospatial Comission (OGC) at: https://github.com/opengeospatial/ets-19139/tree/feature-issue-javadoc/src/main/resources/org/opengis/cite/schematron
The BAS Metadata Library cannot validate records against these schematrons, due to lack of support for schematron validation in Python.
JSON Schemas
JSON Scemas for the unofficial JSON encoding of ISO 19115 used in the BAS Metadata Library are available at: https://github.com/antarctica/metadata-library#supported-configuration-versions
This JSON encoding is specific to the use of ISO 19115 within BAS. It is not a general purpose, or necessarily correct, encoding and should not be relied on by others.
XML stylesheets
ISO 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, whilst reflecting the structure and property names of the ISO 19115 data model.
This stylesheet supports both ISO 19115:2003 and ISO 19115-2:2009.
A copy of this stylesheet is available from:
To use this stylesheet in an ISO 19115 record:
ISO Rubric
The SpiralTracker report stylesheet, from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), assesses the quality of a metadata record against various measures, including discoverability.
This stylesheet supports both ISO 19115:2003 and ISO 19115-2:2009.
A copy of this stylesheet is available from:
To use this stylesheet in an ISO 19115 record:
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