The Catalogue, Metadata and Resource Discovery TN [RD5] contains the results of the Technology Watch activities on Catalogue, Metadata and Resource Discovery of the GIGAS Project.

The Technical Note describes the status of this topic in the various initiatives, European projects and standardization bodies: INSPIRE, GMES, GEOSS, ISO/TC 211, CEN, OGC, SANY, GEOLAND2, INTERRISK and GENESI-DR. The status of the relevant metadata and catalogue services standards and documents developed in these initiatives and projects is presented using the RM-ODP approach as defined in [AD2].

Metadata and catalogue services are a fundamental part of a spatial data infrastructure. They allow the end user to discover, evaluate and use the available data and services. They are the main entry point into the infrastructure. The three initiatives and European projects studied in GIGAS have thus set up catalogue services giving access to metadata instances. They make use of ISO, OGC and OASIS standards and other documents on the topic of metadata and catalogue services:

• Dublin Core,
• ISO 19115/19119/19139,
• OGC GML,
• OASIS ebXML,
• OGC CS-W.

All have similar use cases: discover metadata records in order to access appropriate datasets and services. All apply ISO and OGC standards; however, they use them in their own way and build specific profiles. Further, the chosen technologies are not necessarily compatible with each other.

These different approaches and solutions work within each initiative, but not across initiative boundaries and thus lead to inefficiencies and interoperability limitations:

• A client software developed for GMES catalogue services cannot interact as is with INSPIRE catalogue services and vice-versa. Connector components need to be developed. This means that cross-initiative interoperability is not ensured and that harmonized discovery of data in a cross-initiative scenario is not possible at the moment.
• Solving the same issue in different ways leads to redundant effort and is thus not cost-effective.
• Solving the same issue in different ways does not help INSPIRE, GMES and GEOSS to have a common and strong voice in standardization bodies.

As a follow up of loop 1, two FP7 projects have been analysed and additional technical aspects have been studied in loop 2 : Registries, Catalog services, distributed searches.

Download full document from GIGAS

dublin core, csw, 19115, 19119, iso, ebxml, registry

inspire, gmes, seis, geoss

Last updated 852 days ago by Simon Cox