Publishing OGC resources discovered on the mainstream web in an SDI catalogue

Abstract

Nowadays geospatial data users search for geospatial information within an SDI using discovery clients of a Geoportal application (i.e. INSPIRE Geoportal). If data producers want to promote related resources and make them available in the SDI, then they need to create metadata according to the predefined rules (i.e. INSPIRE metadata regulation) and publish them using a CSW standard. This approach allows for either distributed searches or harvesting metadata from different SDI nodes. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of data producers making their resources available on the Web without documenting and publishing in a standardised way. The paper describes a workflow to provide a tool to make OGC-based geospatial services found on the Internet discoverable through CSW-compatible service catalogues and, hence, more visible to a wider SDI community.