12 July 2016. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) announces the release of version 3.0 of the OGC Catalogue Services standard.
Catalogue services support the ability to publish and search geospatial data and services. Information (metadata) provided by catalogues supports evaluation and further processing by both humans and software.
The OGC Catalogue interface standards specify the interfaces, bindings, and a framework for defining application profiles required to discover and access digital catalogues of metadata for geospatial data, services, and related resource information. The query capabilities of the OGC General Catalogue Model provide a minimum set of data types and query operations that can be assumed of OGC Compliant Catalogue implementations. In addition, these query capabilities provide a high degree of flexibility enabling alternate styles of query, result presentation, and the potential support of any geo-enabled query language.
Catalogue Services 3.0 better aligns with other OGC standards (such as OWS Common 2.0 and Filter 2.0), provides a developer-friendly OpenSearch Geo API, supports querying via temporal extents, and improves distributed search to better federate catalogues.
The OGC also provides a CSW 3.0 compliance test suite, which is available on the OGC validation web site. The CSW compliance test allows any implementer to test compatibility for free and/or apply for certification: http://cite.opengeospatial.org/teamengine/.
Two reference implementations (pycsw and Esri Geoportal Server) are available for the community to re-use, easily implement, or customize: https://github.com/opengeospatial/cite/wiki/Reference-Implementations.
About the OGC
The OGC is an international consortium of more than 515 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at www.opengeospatial.org.
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