To organize individual Internet resources into a unified and informative collection, MRIB uses an ontological subject classification. MRIB is a USGS digital library for scientific information concerning the oceans and the adjacent parts of the atmosphere and solid earth, as well as the people, techniques, and organizations in the marine sciences. The MRIB ontology collocates resources on related topics, and provides a navigation structure that informs users about the interrelationships between the coastal and oceanic environments, other Earth processes, and human activities.

MRIB presents information in the context of an ontology that contains a controlled vocabulary in several subject facets. The MRIB web-interface allows users to navigate through the facet hierarchies and to combine terms from different facets. Search results are also displayed hierarchically so users can explore related research subjects. This is analogous to a librarian showing patrons the various aisles of a library so that patrons can browse not only the books on a specific subject, but also the related ones located in the nearby shelves.

MRIB aspires to be useful to scientists, decision-makers, students, legislators, and the general public, without requiring more than a high-school-level science education. This means that MRIB does not target its services, functions and ontology to a well-defined audience. By providing hierarchical classification trees, MRIB lets the users choose their level of scientific detail. This leads to an ongoing challenge in MRIB development: discovering simple, universally understood terms for the top-level categories.

The goal of providing quality-controlled, up-to-date information is achieved with a central catalog and a distributed collection. A central cataloguer reviews Internet resources and creates metadata for those judged to be of high quality. By leaving the collection itself on the servers of the scientific projects that create it, MRIB provides access to the latest version.

Although not intended primarily as a resource for students and teachers, MRIB’s interactive yet organized access to a quality-controlled collection provides an environment for learning. MRIB is also convenient for teachers looking for curriculum resources about human-environment relationships.