International Geoscience Information Standards, Management and Governance

International standards are important for communication of geoscience information across borders and between countries, and in particular for addressing multinational and global issues such as climate change, resilience to natural hazards and sustainable resource extraction.

The Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI) is the International Union of Geological Sciences’ (IUGS) commission for developing, managing and governing geoscience data models and vocabularies, amongst other standards. CGI undertakes its activities through working groups arranged around different types of information standards and through its governing council. With members drawn from most continents and regions, their collaboration results in standards that are internationally applicable; the GeoSciML and EarthResourceML are examples of data models developed with multinational cooperation and applied in global and regional applications such as OneGeology and Minerals4EU. The data models are supported by geoscience vocabularies developed and published by CGI.

CGI as an IUGS commission has both a unique position and an opportunity around governance of global geoscience information standards. Through its enduring status, CGI is not bound by finite and funding-constrained projects. The contributing projects can be very influential for standards development but sustaining standards after project cessation can be difficult.

To date, CGI has tended to manage and govern standards it has developed or co-developed. The opportunity for CGI going forward is to take more of a leadership role across IUGS and internationally-focussed societies and agencies to host, manage and/or promote their standards. With growing expectations of FAIR Principles adherence across the global geoscience community, CGI, as a commission of the IUGS, can help enable their implementation through providing enduring, authorised, geoscience information standards and services.