Why is the metadata standard so complex?
The standard is designed to describe all possible geospatial data. There are 334 different elements in the FGDC standard, 119 of which exist only to contain other elements. These compound elements are important because they describe the relationships among other elements. For example, a bibliographic reference is described by an element called Citation_Information which contains both a Title and a Publication_Date. You need to know which publication date belongs to a particular title; the hierarchical relationship described by Citation_Information makes this clear.
