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OGC Members Adopt Specification For Catalog Services

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) announced that the OpenGIS Catalog Services Specification 2.0 has been adopted by the OGC membership. This specification documents industry consensus on an open, standard interface that enables diverse but conformant applications to perform discovery, browse and query operations against distributed and potentially heterogeneous catalog servers. It includes a number of improvements over the preceding version, version 1.1.1. Industry agreement on a common interface for publishing metadata and supporting discovery of geospatial data and services is an important step toward giving Web users and applications access to all types of geographic information and services. The specification is available at portal.opengis.org/files/?artifact_id=5929.

Catalog services are required to support the discovery of registered network accessible resources within and between collaborating communities that seek to share information and processing resources efficiently. "Resources" includes not only data but also services, schemas, symbology libraries and other elements of Web based geoprocessing. "Communities" in the OGC context refer to communities who use similar formal vocabularies for geospatial features and phenomena such as roads, wetlands, land use zones, population density, etc.

Doug Nebert of the US Federal Geographic Data Committee Secretariat, who chairs the OGC Technical Committee Catalog Working Group, said, "In government, business and academia, technical and semantic non-interoperability have long frustrated discovery and sharing of digital geographic information. This specification is an industry-approved design for a key part of all future internet-based solutions to these problems."

Rob Atkinson, director and chief technical officer of Social Change Online (Australia), explained, "The OGC 2.0 Catalog specification provides not only a Web services model, but a way to develop consistent sets of simplified profiles that will make real world usage much easier, more useful and more stable. In Australia and internationally, sets of related catalog profiles are necessary to achieve semantic interoperability."