The NSF Grant Proposal Guide, (chap. II.C.2, NSF 11-1 January 2011) specifies that the data management plan include the standards to be used for data and metadata format and content.
There are a number of metadata schema, or systems of structured information, all of which should address some basic functions:
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Availability: the information needed for other researchers to discover your data.
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Usefulness: the information needed to determine if a set of data meets a specific need.
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Access: the information needed to acquire a specific data set.
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Transfer: the information needed to use a set of data.
Discipline-specific data repositories or archives may require standard metadata schema, or certain schema may be recommended for special kinds of data. Some data resources for the sciences include:
National Science Digital Library
Federal Geographic Data Committee
Content Standard for Digital Geospatial Metadata (an extensive and multiply-linked HTML document)
IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology
SEED: Standard for Exchange of Earthquake Data (PDF)
Dryad (Biosciences data sets)
Dryad Metadata Application Profile
NASA Planetary Data System (PDS)
PDS Standards Reference
Tools & Documentation for using and creating data
SIMBAD (Astronomy)
Catalog to data format types in SIMBAD
Data Documentation Initiative (DDI)
"A metadata specification for the social and behavioral sciences." The DDI Alliance seeks to create an international XML metadata standard to describe social sciences data.
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