The establishment of China's core biodiversity metadata standard

Biodiversity metadata provide service to query, management and use of actual data sets. The progress of the development of metadata standards in China was analyzed, and metadata required and/or produced based on the Convention on Biological Diversity were reviewed. A biodiversity metadata standard was developed based on the characteristics of biodiversity data and in line with the framework of international metadata standards. The content of biodiversity metadata is divided into two levels. The first level consists of metadata entities and elements that are necessary to exclusively identify a biodiversity data set, and is named as Core Metadata. The second level comprises metadata entities and elements that are necessary to describe all aspects of a biodiversity data set. The standard for core biodiversity metadata is presented in this paper, which is composed of 51 elements belonging to 6 categories (entities), i.e. inventory information, collection information, information on the content of the data set, management information, access information, and metadata management information. The name, definition, condition, data type, and field length of metadata elements in these six categories (entities) are also described.