The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) has adopted as an official OGC Best Practice a document titled, “OGC EO Product Collection, Service and Sensor Discovery using the CS-W ebRIM Catalogue.”
This OGC Best Practices Document describes the relations that exist between several metadata conceptual models: Earth Observation (EO) Product, EO Product Collections, Sensors and Services. Specification of the linking between artifacts of these types is important for the process of cataloguing and discovering those artifacts.
CSW, or “Catalog Service – Web,” is one profile of the OGC Catalog Service Standard, which defines common interfaces to discover, browse, and query metadata about data, services, and other resources. Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language, or ebXML, is a family of XML based standards sponsored by OASIS and UN/CEFACT providing an open infrastructure that enables global use of electronic business information in an interoperable, secure, and consistent manner. ebRIM is the accompanying electronic business Registry Information Model.
During the Heterogeneous Missions Accessibility (HMA) series of projects managed by the European Space Agency (ESA), the HMA stakeholders defined a minimal set of metadata elements that are required to describe a collection of EO products. The stakeholders also defined a minimal set of metadata elements required to describe the different Web service instances that are being deployed throughout the Ground Segments of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) Contributing Missions.
These Web services include catalogue services for discovery of EO products, EO product collections and EO services, ordering services, feasibility analysis, Web map services and Web coverage services. This OGC Best Practice is a result of their efforts and discussions about these issues among the OGC membership. The document was finalized in the ESA General Support Technology Programme (GSTP) “Semantic-Web for Mediated Access Across Domains” (SMAAD) project.
The OGC EO Product Collection, Service and Sensor Discovery using the CS-W ebRIM Catalogue document is available and free to the public here.
