A 20 minute presentation given in Denver (CO) on the 17th September as part of the Biosharing Registry WG, Metadata Standards Catalog WG, and Publishing Data Workflows WG joint session at the Research Data Alliance 8th Plenary (part of International Data Week). This presentation covers the explosion of metadata standards and databases in the life, biomedical and environmental sciences and how BioSharing is helping to understand this landscape, both in terms of the relationship between standards and other standards and databases, and the life cycle and evolution of each resource. BioSharing also links these resources to the data policies that recommend them (for example, from funding agencies or journal publishers), enabling an understanding of the entire data cycle, from conception to publishing and storage.