Welcome to the MERIDIAN metadata profile documentation!

This document was last modified on 2019-11-25.

The MERIDIAN Metadata Profile for Underwater Acoustic and Vessel Tracking Data (henceforth referred to as “The MERIDIAN profile”) is a modification of the published geographic metadata standards ISO 19115:2003 and ISO 19115-2:2009 and combines them with a modified version of the Darwin Core metadata standard. The MERIDIAN profile defines the recommended content of metadata for acoustic data and vessel tracking data, as collected via the MERIDIAN Submission Form, and how this metadata will be displayed within the MERIDIAN Discovery Portal.

The MERIDIAN profile is one piece of our work in making underwater acoustic data more FAIR, by increasing the discoverability (findability), accessibility, and re-usability of the data. This also facilities interoperability by ensuring they are described in a consistent manner and are accessible. Thus we believe this contributes to all elements of the FAIR principles. To this end, we opted to modify and combine existing international metadata standards for geospatial and biological data, rather than construct a new standard from scratch. It is our hope that this will facilitate interoperability of our repository with our existing relevant metadata repositories and catalogues.

Below is a graphical tree diagram illustrating the elements in our metadata profile. Fuller details can be found beginning in section 4.