The Global Observing System Information Centre (GOSIC) is intended to provide a single point of access to data and information, observational requirements, data flows, and products within the three observing systems: Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS), and Global Climate System (GCOS). NASA's Global Change Master Directory (GCMD), an information system for locating and discovering Earth science data sets relevant to global change research (http://gcmd.nasa.gov) and GOSIC have formed a collaboration whereby metadata for GTOS, GOOS and GCOS data sets can be located and retrieved through the GCMD database.

GCMD portals, representing customized views of the database for each of the three global observing systems provide search and retrieval of GOSIC data set information by free-text queries or Earth science keywords (http://gcmd.nasa.gov/Data/portals/gosic/). To date, more than 350 data sets have been identified and entered into the GCMD. The GCMD-GOSIC collaboration allows users to quickly locate data sets of interest from the global observing systems, and, where possible, download the data. GOSIC representatives have also worked closely with GCMD to identify controlled science keywords for describing GTOS data sets based on the GTOS Terrestrial Ecosystem Monitoring Sites (TEMS).

In the spring of 2004, the GCMD and GOSIC coordinated metadata activities with the NOAA National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). NCDC metadata from the NOAA Metadata Management Repository (NMMR) was automatically harvested and translated by the GCMD for the GOSIC portal by implementing eXtensible Style Sheet Language Transformations (XSLT) and open-source software to facilitate the transfer of XML metadata from NCDC to the GCMD.

The Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS) is an international programme for observations, modelling, and analysis of terrestrial ecosystems to support sustainable development. GTOS facilitates access to information on terrestrial ecosystems so that researchers and policy makers can detect and manage global and regional environmental change. In collaboration with GOSIC and GCMD, GTOS led the development of an online data matrix providing access to selected datasets registered in the GCMD.

In the future, GCMD and GOSIC will continue to work on enhancing the set of scientific keywords for indexing and searching, increasing the population of global observing system datasets, and using geospatial technologies for improved search and retrieval.