OGC - Geospatial Catalog Application Profile

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) (MD, USA) has released a Request for Comment on a new candidate OGC standard: OpenGIS Catalogue Services Specification 2.0.1 - ISO Metadata Application Profile. This document specifies a catalogue application profile based on ISO19115:2003/ISO19119:2005 metadata with support for XML encoding per ISO/CD TS 19139 and HTTP protocol binding.

Catalogue services are the key technology for locating, managing and maintaining distributed geo-resources (i.e. geospatial data, applications and services). With OGC catalogue services, client applications are capable of searching for geo-resources in a standardised way (i.e. through standardised interfaces and operations) and, ideally, they are based on a well-known information model, which includes spatial references and further descriptive (thematic) information that enables client applications to search for geo-resources in very efficient ways.