In the 2012 President's Budget Request, the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) is terminated. As a result, all resources, databases, tools, and applications within this web site will be removed on January 15, 2012. For more information, please refer to the NBII Program Termination page.
The NBII biological metadata standard has been developed as a "biological data profile" of the Federal Geographic Data Committee’s (FGDC) Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM). The objective of the NBII Program is to provide one inclusive biological metadata standard that can be used to describe biological data and information in all its forms, and also provide maximum compatibility with the FGDC geospatial metadata standard.
The Biological Data Profile (BDP) is an approved profile to the FGDC-Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (CSDGM), meaning it provides additional fields to the FGDC-CSDGM standard. These fields allow biological information such as taxonomy, methodology, and analytical tools to be added to a metadata record. Since biological data sets can be either geospatial or non-geospatial in their nature, the Biological Data Profile is designed to be used to document both geospatial and non-geospatial data sets. As a profile, all the requirements of the Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata must be met for any geospatial biological data set. The Biological Data Profile extends the use of the Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata into documenting non-geospatial data sets, when biological in nature.
