The U.S. Geoscience Information Network is a national, distributed, interoperable system being built in collaboration between state geological surveys and the U.S. Geological Survey. Progress in the past year in implementing and deploying components for the network include a metadata catalog and search tool, file repository, and GML simple feature content models. The catalog is implemented using ESRI Geoportal, free, open-source software (http://catalog.usgin.org/geoportal). The catalog uses the USGIN ISO metadata profile, and implements the OGC Catalog Service for the Web (CSW 2.0.2) and ESRI REST service interfaces. The USGIN team has been working with GEON and the USGS National Digital Catalog to integrate their catalogs of resources with the network. A web tool to create metadata to register resources and upload files to a file repository has been implemented as a Drupal v6 application (http://repository.usgin.org/); when resources are registered and published, the application pushes metadata to a web accessible directory for harvest into the Geoportal-based catalog. A collection of GML simple-feature content models have been developed for use by state geological surveys to publish data to the National Geothermal Data System (http://www.stategeothermaldata.org/data_­delivery/­content_model_templates). These are built as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to facilitate data loading; deployed services use an XML encoding of the content model as an interchange format. OGC Web Feature Services have been deployed by the Arizona, Illinois, and Kentucky geological surveys as server hubs for the NGDS. GML simple feature models are used because WFS serving simple features can be consumed by ArcGIS; thus a widely utilized client platform is already available for service utilization.

The USGIN team has also participated in standards development including the international GeoSciML markup language, the Energistics metadata workgroup that is contributing to revision of the ISO 19115 and 119 metadata standards, development of vocabularies for rock type and numerous geologic feature properties for use in populating GeoSciML instance documents, and AASG-USGS development of a relational data base format for geologic map data (NCGMP09, http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/Info/standards/NCGMP09/).