You may also view a graphic depiction of the entire tree. This is the root class based primarily on the Dublin Core metadata set. Any information resource can be described with the elements in this module. The element set provides the necessary information to cite, describe, and discover a resource, including descriptors for taxonomic, spatial and temporal coverage, keywords, title, etc. This is the root most relevant to this committee.
Bibliographic references are another class of information resource.
Lower-level descriptors are organized under a choice domain of reference type such as article, book, thesis, etc. This file contains elements describing entities within datasets. The information contained at this level is primarily logical - it is a description of the information independent of the particular format in which it may be distributed. This file uses the fgdc structure for expressing the source documents and processing steps used to create a new entity. For each logical entity, there can be one or more physical distributions of that information.