ISRIC Report 2016/02: Overview of procedures and standards in use at ISRIC WDC-Soils

This report serves to give an overview of main procedures and standards in use at ISRIC – World Soil Information, regular member of the ICSU World Data System. These cover the whole data life cycle from field sampling to serving quality-assessed soil data to the world community. Consistent procedures and de facto standards are used to screen (QA/QC) and standardise respectively harmonise the wide range of soil-related data that have been shared with us for consideration in our world-covering databases and web services. Ultimately, these processes are aimed at facilitating global data interoperability and citeability in compliance with FAIR principles: the data should be ‘findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable’.