UK-GEMINI Introduction

This page describes the requirements and guidance for metadata conforming to the UK standard known as UK GEMINI. There are several entry points to the guidance:

Conformance to GEMINI should ensure conformance to the INSPIRE Implementing Rules. UK specific guidance is provided.
If you’re thinking, why GEMINI? Why not just use the INSPIRE Metadata guidance or the ISO standards? Click here for some reasons.
The UK Government Digital Service recommends using GEMINI when describing geographic data and it is the preferred way to catalogue geographic data and services at Data.gov.uk.

Both UK GEMINI and the INSPIRE Technical Guidance have been developed from the International Standard ISO 19115:2003 Geographic information - Metadata, with supplementary material from ISO 19119:2005 Geographic information - Services. The XML encoding follows ISO 19139:2007 Geographic information - Metadata - XML encoding. This means that a GEMINI record is widely understood by geospatial software and users internationally.

Note that GEMINI (and the INSPIRE Guidance) are about metadata for datasets, series, and services (collectively, 'resources'); not everything in a GEMINI record can be assumed to be true individually for each feature instance in the resource. The underlying ISO standards (19115, 19139) do allow for metadata at the instance level, so the elements could be used to describe metadata for that, but the guidance here may not be appropriate and the resulting record could not be validated as a GEMINI (or INSPIRE) record.

Here is a summary of changes from earlier versions.

Here is a summary of the GEMINI elements (similar to Table 1 and Table 2 in GEMINI 2.2).

Note: in GEMINI 2.3, the GEMINI Element number is called "GEMINI id"; the actual numbers have not changed, where the same element was in GEMINI 2.2.