The DoD Net Centric Data Strategy identifies the goals of making data visible, accessible, and understandable and emphasizes that metadata is needed to "facilitate the discovery of data assets". In response to the need of the M&S community, the Modeling and Simulation Coordination Office (M&SCO), developed extensions to the DDMS to facilitate the search and discovery of M&S resources. The result is the M&S Community of Interest (COI) Discovery Metadata Specification (MSC-DMS).

The MSC-DMS standardizes a set of metadata used to describe resources in Modeling and Simulation Resource Repository (MSRR) nodes and similar applications. The MSC-DMS aligns with the DDMS as part of the Global Information Grid (GIG) /Net-Centric Data Strategy.

The MSC-DMS identifies the necessary discovery metadata data elements to support the visibility, accessibility and understandability of M&S resources within the DoD community. Such M&S resources include, but are not limited to the following:

• M&S software (implementations of a model or simulation)
• Adjunct tools (e.g., data loggers)
• Federations of simulations
• M&S software components
• M&S services (models and simulations implemented as web services)
• M&S data (data in M&S-usable format and data produced by M&S)
• M&S data models (structural metadata for M&S data)
• Interface specifications
• M&S software design documents

Links to the latest release of the MSC-DMS and supporting MSC-DMS Implementation Guide are provided at the bottom of the page. Developers and publishers of M&S assets are encouraged to use the latest specification and guide to document resources that are to be cataloged or shared amongst the community.

Change requests (CRs) can be submitted as well against version 1.3.1 of the specification using the link provided below.

Furthermore, links to previous versions of the MSC-DMS are provided as well, to support repositories, users, and subset of the community who have not yet migrated to the latest version of the MSC-DMS.

• You can download the Change Request (CR) Form (Microsoft Word) for submitting change requests against the MSC-DMS here.

Note: CRs for version 1.3.1 of the MSC-DMS must be submitted by Aug 1, 2010.

• You can download the specification for Version 1.3.1 (released 3/22/2010) here.
• The MSC-DMS Schema (v1.3.1) is located here.
• The MSC-DMS Specification (v1.4 released 12/24/2010) is located here.

• A supporting MSC-DMS Implementation Guide, v1 (PDF), which describes the process to document and catalog M&S resources using the MSC-DMS, is located here.
• A supporting MSC-DMS Implementation Guide for version 1.4 should be arriving soon.