Department of Defense Discovery Metadata Specification Home Page

(from the website)

"Discovery" is the ability to locate data assets through a consistent and flexible search. Visibility, accessibility, and understandability are the high priority goals of the DoD Net-Centric Data Strategy. Of these goals, visibility and discovery are intimately linked. Visibility of a resource is, in a practical sense, useless, if the resource is not easily discoverable. With the express purpose of supporting the visibility goal of the DoD Net-Centric Data Strategy, the DDMS specifies a set of information fields that are to be used to describe any data or service asset, i.e., resource, that is to be made discoverable to the Enterprise, and it serves as a reference for developers, architects, and engineers by laying a foundation for Discovery Services. The DDMS will be employed consistently across the Department's disciplines, domains and data formats. This document describes the DDMS elements and their logical groupings. It does not provide an interchange specification or substantive implementation guidance. The DDMS elements as specified in this document, however, should provide a basis for organizations to begin planning, transitioning, and implementing metadata tagging initiatives that support the Department's goal of increased data visibility and Enterprise Discovery. The current version of the DoD Discovery Metadata Specification and the current XML implementation can be downloaded via the link below. Previous versions of the DDMS and their XML implementations are also available under "Prior Releases.".