The evolution of a geoscience standard: An instructive tale of science keyword development and adoption

• Standards must be managed through an agile process connected with the community. • One must inclusively and transparently consider roles in a standards process. • Good standards enable services, which are more difficult than products to maintain. • Representing relationships is central to interdisciplinary interoperability. In 1987, NASA sponsored an international workshop that inspired the Directory Interchange Format or DIF – a metadata format to enable “catalog interoperability”. The DIF formed the basis of the International Directory Network (IDN) and the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) and included a set of science keywords. The primary intent was to catalog NASA Earth science and related data, but the keywords have been implemented in many different systems and adopted in varying ways by many different organizations around the world. This review provides an ethnographic examination of how the keywords have evolved and been managed and how they have been adopted over the last 35 years. It illustrates how semantic approaches have evolved over time and provides insights on how standards and associated processes can be sustained and adaptable. Ongoing institutional commitment is essential, but so is transparency and technical flexibility. Understanding and empowering the different roles involved in standards creation, maintenance, and use of standards as well as the services that standards enable is also critical. It is apparent that semantic representations need to be mindful of different contexts and carefully define verbs as well as nouns and categories. Understanding and representing relationships is central to interdisciplinary interoperability.