"[2] The initial focus of GCIS is to support the United States Third National Climate Assessment (NCA3), which is to publish reports that enhance the transparency and ability of decision-makers to understand the conclusions and use of the underlying data for their own purposes.
[3][4] The project scope includes analyzing alterations in climate, land use and land cover, natural resources including water, agriculture and biodiversity, atmospheric composition, chemical composition and ecological systems that may alter the Earth's capacity to sustain life.
Records of objects and relationships within the GCIS are represented in a database for the Semantic Web, which can be queried using the SPARQL language.
By categorizing, annotating, and linking provenance information, the GCIS becomes capable of answering provenance-tracking questions about global change research.
[6][7] The GCIS Ontology[8] promotes representation and documentation by incorporating the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s recommendation on provenance modeling (PROV) into the design.