Profiles are documents that provide guidance for the use of one or more standards for some particular application, as well as specifying some some aspects that are not treated in any of the standards documents. Profiles for particular geoscience information web services are the artifacts that define the US Geoscience Information Network; these constitute the community aggreements that make interoperability possible within the network.

Profiles listed here are in various development stages.

GeoSciML services are OGC Web Feature Services (WFS) that utilize GeoSciML as the transport encoding for filters in requests and for response documents. These services are being integrated into OneGeology for delivery of geoscience feature data. The CGI Interoperability working group has conducted 3 testbed excercises in the development of these services, and a few operational examples exist. Many details of content encoding, vocabulary usage and service architecture have emerged that will need to be specified in a USGIN profile for these services to make them interoperable.

The USGIN Catalog profile is in active development and testing under the auspices of the NSF-funded Geoscience Interoperability Project. A Profile document draft will be posted soon. This profile will detail use of ISO 19139 encoding of the ISO 19115/119 content models for metadata, using the North American profile of ISO 19115, to define an ISO output schema for use with the OGC catalog service for the web (CSW 2.0.2)

Vocabulary Service development is occurring in numerous different contexts around the world, and there is as yet no emerging group working on development of a standard vocabulary service. In the context of geoscience information, the Australian AuScope project has been making a great deal of progress in specifying and developing a vocabulary service that will guide development of a USGIN vocabulary service profile. Stay tuned and get involved!