INTERAGENCY DATA DISCOVERY SYSTEMS: There are several tools available, or being planned as part of the interagency initiatives, that support part of this task. The Federal agencies are implementing information locator systems compliant with the Government Information Locator Service (GILS) as specified in OMB Bulletin 95-01. The participating agencies of the U.S. Global Change Research Program are implementing the Global Change Data and Information System which is a distributed system of agency holdings of global change data and information.

The design of the NEDI must be flexible and be able to accommodate existing locator systems that are based on various metadata formats corresponding to different data categories of interest to users. The Global Change Master Directory, developed by NASA and others in the last decade, is based on the Data Interchange Format (DIF), which uses a set of keywords and parameters. The USMARC format is widely used in the library community. Although this format is tailored to library needs, it is useful for some environmental queries. The newest metadata standard is the Spatial Metadata Standard developed through the FGDC to be implemented in the FGDC Clearinghouse. This standard was developed with the surveying and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) communities in mind. It provides a format for information such as surveys, roads, political boundaries, hydrography, land use, and other spatially referenced data. The proposed National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) will use a relevant subset of the FGDC Spatial Metadata Standard to document non-spatial data.