ISO 19115/19139
Last updated
Last updated
This standards family is recommended for all discovery metadata.
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
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
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
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
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:
The ISO 19115 standards family uses controlled vocabularies for two concepts:
code lists
descriptive keywords
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:
There are a number of descriptive keywords that can be used within records, including:
free-text, uncontrolled, terms specific to each resource
The ISO 19115 standards family uses two methods for checking records comply with the standard:
The BAS Metadata Library cannot validate records against these schematrons, due to lack of support for schematron validation in Python.
A copy of this stylesheet is available from:
To use this stylesheet in an ISO 19115 record:
A copy of this stylesheet is available from:
To use this stylesheet in an ISO 19115 record:
BAS has purchased copies of these standards. Contact the for more information.
BAS has purchased copies of these standards. Contact the for more information.
international or reigional vocabularies maintained by an external authority such as
organisational vocabularies maintained locally such as
XML Schema Definitions (XSDs) for ISO are available from ISO at:
The BAS Metadata Library can against these schemas.
Constructing a complete validation/dependency chain for these schemas is quite difficult. A set of is available from, and used within, the BAS Metadata Library. These schemas are to use relative imports and a single version of the GML and GMD schemas.
XML Schematrons for are available from the Open Geospatial Comission (OGC) at:
JSON Scemas for the unofficial JSON encoding of ISO 19115 used in the are available at:
The 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.
The stylesheet, from the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), assesses the quality of a metadata record against various measures, including discoverability.