Welcome to this demonstration of NASA’s “Global Change Master Directory Services” portal. This demonstration will show how to conduct a search through the interface to directly access an Earth Science service.

As you can see, the GCMD interface allows you to search by Earth Science service topic. These keywords characterize the types of services available for your search.

You may also search or refine by “Ancillary Descriptions” -- such as Service Providers, Instruments, Platforms, Sources, Projects, or by Science Keywords). We will start our search by clicking on “Data Analysis and Visualization”. Next, click on “Geographic Information Systems, and then on “Web Based Geographic Information Systems”.

On this page, we see the types of GIS services available. In the “Refine by Full Text” box, type: “Soils” and then click “go”. Click on the “Soil Map Internet Service” metadata record.

When you click on the record, you will see the brief form. Click on “View Full Record” to view the entire metadata record. This record describes the service in detail … and … includes a summary of the service.

Earth science and Service keywords aid in the discovery of the service general keywords to describe the service, service provider and contact information for the service, and direct links to the service and related information.

Click on “Get Service” at the top of the metadata record. Then click on the first “Access Map Viewer” Related_URL. This takes you to a map service where you can view soil data. The map service retrieves geospatial data from a server and then displays it in a viewer for you to view and analyze.

You have the option to select different layers, zoom, pan, and/or query the data in the viewer.

Click on a layer in the “layers” list and then refresh the map to retrieve the GIS data and display it on the map. It may take a few seconds.

Close the viewer to go return to the metadata record.

In conclusion, this demonstration illustrated how to use the GCMD interface to conduct a search to find an Earth science service.

Thank you and this concludes this demonstration of NASA’s Global Change Master Directory.