The main reason to document data is to maintain an organization's investment in its geospatial data. Organizations that do not document their data often find that, over time or because of personnel changes, they no longer know the content or quality of their data. Organizations then cannot trust the results generated from the data in which they have invested their time and resources. In addition, the lack of information about other organizations' data often leads to a needless duplicating of effort. The standard specifies information that helps prospective users to determine what data exist, the fitness of these data for their applications, and the conditions for accessing these data.
Metadata also aid the transfer of data to other users' systems.
The National Spatial Data Infrastructure. This executive order instructs Federal agencies to use the standard to document new geospatial data beginning in 1995, and to provide these metadata to the public through the National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse. The standard provides a common set of terminology and definitions for the documentation of geospatial data. The standard establishes the names of data elements and groups of data elements to be used for these purposes, the definitions of these data elements and groups, and information about the values that are to be provided for the data elements. These characteristics form a continuum in which a user moves through a number of choices to determine what data are available, to evaluate the fitness of data, to acquire the data, and to transfer and process the data.