To aid broad interdisciplinary discovery of IPY data, the IPY Data Policy and Management Subcommittee has created an initial metadata profile. A metadata profile is a set of required fields and vocabularies for a given metadata standard.

The purpose of the IPY Metadata Profile is to ensure that we capture a bare minimum of information necessary to allow simple discovery across disciplines and to ensure we can track the heritage of the metadata in a broadly distributed data management environment.

All IPY data registries and repositories collecting data and metadata from IPY projects are required to collect and share sufficient information to adhere to the IPY Metadata Profile requirements. Similarly, IPY projects are required to submit the compliant metadata to appropriate registries and repositories as they are available. (Note: The IPY Metadata Profile has very minimal requirements. These are necessary but insufficient requirements for adequate data stewardship.)

This is only an initial standard for IPY. The Data Committee seeks feedback from IPY participants on how this profile fits their discipline or community of practice. More information is available at http://ipydis.org/metadata.html