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Internationally, some frameworks and standards are available for vegetation and earth observations. Firstly, Veg-X, an XML-based data exchange standard for vegetation data, published in 2011. Veg-X is one of the few standards for ecological plot-based surveys that acknowledge the importance of representing the feature of interest (i.e. measured variable) accurately at the different granularity levels (e.g. measurements made at the plant individual level and measurements made at the aggregation of plant individuals level). It is difficult to assess whether Veg-X is still actively being used or developed.

ODM2 (and before it, ODM) is an information model for feature-based earth observationsthat supports interoperability across multiple scientific domains.

Guiding principles

The Plot-X exchange standard uses CSV (comma separated values) format to represent the data due to its ease of use for both technical and non-technical users. Since Plot-X is based on O&M and the core concepts are quite minimal, adoption of Plot-X and its CSV exchange format should be fairly easy.

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