DoD Discovery Metadata Specification

Definition
The DoD Discovery Metadata Specification (DDMS) defines discovery metadata elements for resources posted to community and organizational shared spaces.

Overview
"Discovery" is the ability to locate data assets through a consistent and flexible search. Visibility, accessibility, and understandability are the high priority goals of the DoD Net-Centric Data Strategy. Of these goals, visibility and discovery are intimately linked.

Visibility of a resource is, in a practical sense, useless, if the resource is not easily discoverable. With the express purpose of supporting the visibility goal of the DoD Net-Centric Data Strategy, the DDMS specifies a set of information fields that are to be used to describe any data or service asset, i.e., resource, that is to be made discoverable to the Enterprise, and it serves as a reference for developers, architects, and engineers by laying a foundation for Discovery Services.