For several metadata fields, MEDIN insists that terms come from a controlled vocabulary to ensure consistency between records. Controlled vocabularies for the marine sector are available from:

Data Guidelines provide a list of information that should be collected with your data to ensure they can be re-used in the future. The guidelines are tailored to different methods and are arranged below by theme.

Discovery metadata is a list of information that accompanies a data set and allows other people to find out what the data set contains, where it was collected and how they can get hold of it.

Standards are common rules, conditions or guidelines and are essential to enable easy discovery and re-use of data. MEDIN promotes the use of standardised field names and controlled vocabularies so that datasets are described in a consistent way for every type of marine data.