About the WYGISC Clearinghouse
 The U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) has developed
resources to help governmental, non-profit, and commercial participants
to make their collections of spatial information searchable and accessible
on the Internet using free reference implementation software. A fundamental
goal of the FGDC Clearinghouse
program is to provide access to digital spatial data through metadata. Metadata
is "data about data", and describes the content, quality, condition and
other characteristics of data. The FGDC has approved the "Content Standards
for Digital Geospatial Metadata", with the purpose of providing a common
set of terminology and definitions for documentation. The standard specifies
information that helps prospective users to determine what data exist, the
fitness of these data for their applications, and conditions for accessing
these data. Clearinghouse sites, such as this one, provide search engines
which allow clients to search metadata in order
to locate data specific and appropriate to their purposes, with links to
either view or download the data once it has been identified.
In April, 1994, President Clinton signed an executive order instructing
Federal agencies to use the FGDC standard to document their geospatial data,
and to provide the metadata to the public as part of the
National Spatial Data Infrastructure
(NSDI). Moderated by the FGDC, the NSDI is an umbrella of policies, standards,
and procedures under which organizations and technologies interact to foster
more efficient use, management, and production of geospatial data.
The major components of the NSDI are a basic framework of digital geospatial
data, known quality thematic data of critical national importance, standards
to facilitate data collection, documentation, access, and transfer, and
the means to search, query, find, access, and use geospatial data. The Wyoming
Natural Resources Data Clearinghouse is an official data node of the NSDI.
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