The General Office of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment ("MEE") has recently released the national environmental protection standards, the Specification for Preparing the Basic Datasets of Environmental Information (Draft for Comment) (the "Draft for Comment"), to seek comments from the units concerned by August 10, 2018.
The main body of the Draft for Comment is organized into six parts, including the "applicable scope", "referenced normative documents", "terms and definitions", "contents and structure", "metadata of basic datasets" and "metadata of relevant data elements in basic datasets". This Draft for Comment is intended for providing guidance for the preparation of basic datasets of environmental information and ensuring that different entities preparing basic datasets will complete this preparation under the unified procedures pursuant to unified requirements on the structure, contents and formats, to fit needs of specific environmental management business. The major reason why only three properties of metadata, including the identification, content and relationship, but excluding the administration, are adopted in the Draft for Comment is that the registration administration is not necessary when basic datasets are prepared, and instead, the MEE will subject the metadata to authorized registration administration in a centralized manner after such datasets have been released.