OGC Catalogue Service (CSW)

Definition: OGC Catalogue interface standards specify the interfaces, bindings, and a framework for defining application profiles required to publish and access digital catalogues of metadata for geospatial data, services, and related resource information. Metadata act as generalised properties that can be queried and returned through catalogue services for resource evaluation and, in many cases, invocation or retrieval of the referenced resource. Catalogue services support the use of one of several identified query languages to find and return results using well-known content models (metadata schemas) and encodings.