Geospatial Metadata Validation Service

This service checks your FGDC-compatible geospatial metadata record using mp (metadata parser). Provide a metadata record that is formatted as indented text, XML, or SGML. Results will show discrepancies between the structure of your metadata record and the expectation of the FGDC metadata standard (FGDC-STD-001-1998) and will show several potentially useful re-expressions of the metadata record itself.

Notes:

If your input file is XML, its name must be something.xml; don't name it something.txt
Your input file really should have an extension indicating its type, such as .txt or .xml. If it doesn't, I will assume it is one of those.
Input file must be smaller than 1024 kilobytes
If you have lots of files to run all at once, alternative procedures are possible.
Writing metadata? Get tools and help at https://geology.usgs.gov/tools/metadata/
If your input file is XML, the language choice will affect the element names in HTML and text output. It doesn't translate the text of your metadata.
This service will recognize elements from
- 1998 FGDC standard
- Biological data profile
- Shoreline profile
- Remote sensing profile
- Lidar extensions from USGS TM11-B4
but some structural rules of those profiles will not be enforced unless you choose the profile from the appropriate drop-down menu
The "Upgrade" function is explained here.
Working with ESRI's ArcCatalog or ArcGIS?
- This service should work if you export ArcGIS metadata to an FGDC-format XML file.
- You may see warning messages about non-standard extensions used by ArcGIS. In most cases these extensions will not adversely affect other software.
If you get lots of unrecognized element errors, you might have metadata that were written for some other metadata standard.
If your input file is indented text and you get lots of errors, you could try the cns variant of this service
No errors? That's good. But this metadata record also gets no errors.