The Common Information Model (CIM) is a metadata standard used by the climate research community and others to describe the artifacts and processes they work with. This includes climate simulations, the specific model components used to run those simulations, the datasets generated by those components, the geographic grids upon which those components and data are mapped, the computing platforms used, and so on. The CIM was originally developed by the Metafor project, whose primary focus was the Fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). Work is ongoing on creating version 2.0 of the CIM which will be better integrated into existing ISO metadata standards. The ES-DOC team is building a set of tools which allow users to create (CIM Questionnaire), archive, view (CIM Viewer), and compare (CIM Comparator) CIM documents.
