Proposal for structuring of metadata in the earth sciences - Specificity of the scientific community

This communication is the result of the joint thought between computer researchers and scientists dealing with the data and the metadata management within the scope of theirs owns research projects. After describing the specificities of the concerned field as well as the base of existing works, we present a gencral model of metadata structuring established from a methodology ob examples extracted from projects carried out by the authors. Finallv, we suggest to integrate the metadata as full dimension of their information systems. In prospect, this methodology can be extended to the environmental information systems used by the managers and the decision-makers.