Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod.

list 2010, 4, 313–334 313

UDK 528:004.6:004.822:81’37:004.738.5
Pregledni znanstveni èlanak

Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information

Systems
Miro GOVEDARICA, Dubravka BOŠKOVIÆ, Dušan PETROVAÈKI,
Toša NINKOV, Aleksandar RISTIÆ – Novi Sad1

ABSTRACT. This paper gives the short review of the Open Geospatial Consortium
(OGC) metadata catalogue services that have the key role in geospatial resource
discovery in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). The notion of Spatial Data Infra-
structure comprises a collection of technologies, policies and institutional agreements
that provide an easier access to geospatial data. The SDI is suitable for usage in geo-
spatial data discovery, evaluation, and also various applications within government,
commercial and non-profit sectors, academic institutions, etc. Metadata catalogue
services have been specified in OGC Catalogue Service Implementation Specification.
The part of the specification that specifies a web interface that supports the storage,
retrieval, and management of data related to web services, is called Catalogue Servi-
ce for the Web (CSW). Metadata catalogues are service brokers that represent a key
component in a service-oriented architecture that manages shared resources and fa-
cilitates the discovery of resources within an open, distributed system. OGC services
have gained significant popularity in recent years and the number of organizations
using them has increased. However, the full potential of metadata catalogues has not
yet been reached, not only because of the lack of appropriate documentation of data in
the form of standardized metadata, but because the lack of semantics of the data. The
analysis of the usage of metadata catalogue services in geodetic information systems
has been given and the proposal for a possible solution for improvement has been
made.

Keywords: OGC Catalogue, CSW, spatial information systems, metadata, semantics.

1
Prof. dr. Miro Govedarica, Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Trg Dositeja Obradoviæa 6,
RS-21000 Novi Sad, Serbia, e-mail: [email protected],
Dubravka Boškoviæ, MSc, Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Trg Dositeja Obradoviæa 6,
RS-21000 Novi Sad, Serbia, e-mail: [email protected],
Prof. emer. dr. Dušan Petrovaèki, Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Trg Dositeja Obradovi-
æa 6, RS-21000 Novi Sad, Serbia, e-mail: [email protected],
Prof. dr. Toša Ninkov, Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Trg Dositeja Obradoviæa 6,
RS-21000 Novi Sad, Serbia, e-mail: [email protected],
Doc. dr. Aleksandar Ristiæ, Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Trg Dositeja Obradoviæa 6,
RS-21000 Novi Sad, Serbia, e-mail: [email protected].
314 Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334

1. Introduction
A service-oriented architecture (SOA) (Erl 2005) is the distributed computing
architecture based on loosely coupled interactions of geo-services in which the
service interaction model illustrates the interaction between different agents for
publishing, discovering, and invoking geo-services, so called “publish-find-bind”
model (Fig. 1). This model involves: publishing resource descriptions so that they
are accessible to prospective users (publish), discovering resources of interest
according to some set of search criteria (find) and interacting with the resource
provider to access the desired resources (bind). Within such architecture a
registry service plays the essential role of matchmaker by providing publication
and search functionality, thereby enabling a requester to dynamically discover
and communicate with a suitable resource provider without requiring the
requester to have advance knowledge about the provider. Benefits of using SOA is
that the monolith software applications are replaced by a set of loosely coupled
services which can be reused and combined in various application domains. Those
services comply with the standards so their users are not vendor-dependent.

Fig. 1. “Publish-Find-Bind” service interaction model.

Service oriented architecture of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is based

on services for geospatial data discovery, access, visualization and processing that
implement the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) (URL 1) specifications and are the
building blocks for the development of the Spatial Data Infrastructure (Nebert
2004). The notion of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) comprises a collection of
technologies, policies and institutional agreements that facilitate access to
geospatial resources. Resource discovery through catalogue services is the key ele-
ment for the development of any SDI (Nogueras-Iso et al. 2005). Catalogue ser-
vices are implemented as part of the geoportals which are web portals where geo-
graphic content can be discovered (Maguire and Longley 2005, Tait 2005). They
provide an access to SDI.
Services that support geospatial data access and visualization include Web Map
Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS)
and have been described in (Bulatoviæ et al. 2010), together with the benefits of
using those services in modern service-oriented architecture of GIS. However, the
key elements in such architecture are registries of geospatial resource descrip-
tions that allow users to find out about the existence of other geospatial services
they can use in their applications. Those services that support geospatial resource
discovery implement OGC Catalogue Service (URL 2) and will be presented in the
rest of the paper.
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Resource descriptions are called metadata, which means data about data.
Metadata are registered in the catalogues. Metadata is used to describe geospatial
resources (data and/or services). Its purpose is to enable geospatial resource dis-
covery, its evaluation and to provide information how to access and use that
resource. Therefore metadata can be divided in three categories: discovery
metadata, exploration metadata and exploitation metadata. Discovery Metadata is
the minimum amount of information that needs to be provided to reveal to the
user the content of the resource. This kind of metadata answers the “what, why
when who, where and how” questions about geospatial resource. Exploration
metadata provides sufficient information to determine that a resource that fit for
a given purpose exists, to evaluate its properties, and to reference some point of
contact for more information. Exploration metadata include information required
to allow the user know whether the data will meet general requirements of
a given problem. Exploitation metadata include those information required to
access, transfer, load, interpret, and apply the data in the end application where it
is exploited.
This paper is organized as follows: the next Section presents the basic concepts of
the OGC Catalogue Service Specification including information models, catalogue
interfaces together with examples, application profiles and catalogue implementa-
tions. Section 3 describes the usage of metadata catalogues in geodetic-cadastral
information systems, lists some of the problems and possible solutions. Finally,
conclusions are given in Section 4.

2. OGC Catalogue Service Specification

Since the geospatial community is a wide community and comprises both tightly
coupled systems implementing functions in a tightly controlled environment, and
various Web based services knowing nothing about the clients, OGC has de-
veloped an abstract model of a metadata catalogue that is called General Cata-
logue Model which can be applied in various catalogue operating environments.
General catalogue model comprises Catalogue Abstract Information Model and
General Catalogue Interface Model which will be described in the following.

2.1. Catalogue Abstract Information Model

Catalogue Abstract Information Model specifies the minimal query language, a
set of core query able attributes (names, definitions, datatypes) and a common re-
cord format that defines the minimal set of elements that should be returned in a
query, called core returnable properties.
The notion of core catalogue schema is related to Catalogue Abstract Information
Model. For the purpose of sharing information within the information commu-
nity, it is necessary to define the metadata schema that provides a common vocab-
ulary to support search, retrieval and an association between the descriptions and
resources. Core catalogue schema comprises core queryable properties and core
returnable properties. Its purpose is to enable interoperability among various
catalogue implementations which can differ in metadata schemas and protocols
used, where the same queries can be executed against any catalogue service
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without modification and without detailed knowledge of the catalogue’s informa-

tion model. In that way metadata returned from different systems can be used by
a single client. This requires a set of general metadata properties that can be used
to characterize any resource. The core metadata is expressed using the syntax of
Dublin Core Metadata, ISO 15836 (URL 3).
Depending on the needs, developers of metadata catalogues may choose to imple-
ment various metadata models to extend Catalogue Abstract Information Model.
Most common are ISO 19115 (URL 4) and OASIS ebXML Registry Information
Models (URL 5). In the remainder of this section four information models that
can be implemented in OGC catalogues will be described.

Dublin Core
The Dublin Core is a metadata element set intended to enable discovery of elec-
tronic resources. It is primarily used for author-generated description of Web re-
sources, but it is also used in communities such as museums, libraries, govern-
ment agencies, and commercial organizations. Dublin Core metadata is specifi-
cally intended to support general-purpose resource discovery. The elements repre-
sent concepts of core elements that are likely to be useful to support resource dis-
covery. It uses only fifteen base text fields, which are usually inadequate for even
basic geospatial resource description and discovery, because there is no mean to
declare what type of content is present in the text element (coordinates, date or
time, place name, etc). Therefore, a more detailed metadata model is needed to
support the discovery of geospatial resources.

ISO 19115 Geographic Information – Metadata

ISO 19100 series of standards is a set of standards that define the basic structure
and semantics of geographic data and services. This series of standards also de-
fines the standard for geospatial metadata: ISO 19115 Geographic Information –
Metadata, so that users that are searching for the appropriate geospatial data can
find them, estimate whether they fit their needs, and to access, transfer and use
them. Accompanying standard ISO 19139 – Metadata – Implementation specifica-
tion (URL 6), defines the Extensible Markup Language (XML) (URL 7) schema
for storing metadata. Because XML has become the industry standard for data
storage and transmission over the Internet, it is necessary to define an XML
schema for describing geospatial data.
ISO 19115 classifies metadata standards into eleven categories and they all be-
long to the Metadata entity set information. These categories are:
• Identification information – provides basic information about the geospatial da-
ta set for the purpose of the data identification;
• Constraint information – describes how the rights for the access and use of meta-
data and geospatial data are regulated;
• Data quality information – defines metadata about the quality of geospatial data
and possibilities of their application with regard to quality;
• Maintenance information – describes the maintenance and updating of metada-
ta and geospatial data;
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• Spatial representation information – describes the mechanism used to represent

spatial information;
• Reference system information – a description of the used spatial and temporal re-
ference systems;
• Content information – describes the content of the dataset and the feature cata-
logue used;
• Portrayal catalogue information – reference to the catalogue that contains met-
hods for the portrayal of geospatial data;
• Distribution information – information about access to geospatial data, methods
of distribution, and the people responsible for the distribution;
• Metadata extension information – describe the structure of user extensions of
metadata;
• Application schema information – describes the application schema of the data
(the conceptual data model, usually expressed in UML).

OASIS ebXML Registry Information Model (ebRIM)

Electronic Business using eXtensible Markup Language, known as e-business
XML, or ebXML, is a family of XML based standards whose goal is to provide an
open, XML-based infrastructure that enables the global use of electronic business
information in an interoperable, secure, and consistent manner by all partners.
The ebXML Registry allows businesses to find one another, to define trading-partner
agreements, and to exchange XML messages in support of business operations.
The goal is to allow all these activities to be performed automatically, without
human intervention, over the Internet.
This catalogue information model is based on version 3.0 of the OASIS ebXML
Registry Information Model (ebRIM 3.0). This model specifies how catalogue con-
tent is structured and interrelated; it constitutes a public schema for discovery
and publication purposes. An ebXML Registry is capable of storing any type of
electronic content such as XML documents, text documents, images, sounds and
videos. The ebRIM uses several standard classification schemes as a mechanism
to provide extensible enumeration types which are used to create classifications
or ontologies for the catalogue content.
The ebRIM information model is a general and flexible one with several extensi-
bility points. A set of extensions that address the needs of a particular application
domain or community of practice may be defined. The ebRIM is more generic and
flexible than ISO 19115 and may contain various contents which is not specifi-
cally indented for geospatial data, and in that way the relationship between GIS
and non-GIS systems is provided.

Web Ontology Language

This information model is based on a semantic markup language for describing
ontologies. Ontology is a formal representation of the knowledge by a set of con-
cepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts (Staab and
Studer 2009). It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be
used to describe the domain. Their role is to provide a shared vocabulary within a
certain domain such as, for example the land administration.
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OWL (URL 9) is a standard for ontology on the Semantic Web from the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (URL 10). It is built on top of RDF (Resource
Description Frame) (URL 11) and RDF Schema (URL 12), a family of specifica-
tions for description of web resources. OWL ontologies may be categorized into
three species or sub-languages: OWL-Lite, OWL-DL and OWL-Full. A defining
feature of each sub-language is its expressiveness. OWL-Lite is the least ex-
pressive sub-language. OWL-Full is the most expressive sub-language, but does
not guarantee computational completeness or decidability. The expressiveness of
OWL-DL falls between that of OWL-Lite and OWL-Full. OWL-DL is much more
expressive than OWL-Lite and is based on Description Logics (Baader et al. 2002),
hence the suffix DL, and allows expressivity without losing computational com-
pleteness and decidability for reasoning.
The information model has two components: one component models RDF and
RDF Schema and another the OWL-DL. OWL-DL is used to ensure computa-
tional resolvability. The main benefit of this information model over others is
that meaning of the concepts are made explicit, so semantic interoperability may
also be achieved in addition to syntactic interoperability provided by OGC stan-
dards. Ontology may be used to automatically reason about the properties of a do-
main, and may be used to describe that domain. Its role is to provide a shared vo-
cabulary within a certain domain and therefore avoid semantic disambiguates.

2.2. General Catalogue Interface Model

General Catalogue Interface Model provides a set of abstract service interfaces to
support retrieval, access, maintenance and organization of catalogs of geospatial
information and associated resources. Specified interfaces allow users or applica-
tions to find information that exists in multiple distributed computing environ-
ments, including the World Wide Web (WWW).
The reference architecture for the development of the OGC Catalogue Interface is
shown in Fig. 2. It is a multi-tier architecture consisting of clients and servers.
Client application communicates via an interface to the catalogue service using
the OGC catalogue interface. Service catalogs can communicate to one of the
three sources in order to respond to the request it received from a client: the
metadata repository that is local to the service catalog, resource service, or other
catalogue service. The interface to the local repository metadata is internal to the

Fig. 2. Reference model architecture.

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catalogue service. The interface to the resource service can be private or some
OGC interface, such as WMS or WFS. The interface between the catalogue ser-
vices is the OGC catalogue interface. In this case, the catalogue service acts as a
client and a server. Data returned from the OGC catalogue service is handled by
the catalogue service that sent the request and it returns them to the original re-
quest. In this way distributed search is accomplished.
General interfaces can be bound to several application protocols. OGC Catalogue
Service specification provides the possibility of implementing a catalogue service
using one of the following application protocols:
• HTTP protocol (URL 13) binding – involves mapping the operations of a Gene-
ral model to the message requests and responses that are common to all web-ba-
sed catalogue services. When the catalogue service implements HTTP protocol
binding it is called Catalogue Services for the Web (CSW) and it will be given in
the following section in more detail.
• Z39.50 protocol binding – it uses client-server architecture based on the messa-
ges implemented using ANSI / NISO Z39.50 Application Service Definition and
Protocol Specification (URL 14) for searching and retrieving information from
remote computer databases.
• CORBA/ IIOP protocol binding – CORBA (Common Object Request Broker
Architecture) (URL 15) is a standard defined by the OMG (Object Management
Group) (URL 16) that enables software components written in different
programming languages and that run on different computers to work
together.

2.2.1. HTTP protocol binding (Catalogue Services for the Web, CSW)
In HTTP protocol binding, the interaction between the client and the server
is accomplished using the standard request-response model of HTTP protocol.
This means that the client, such as web browser, submits an HTTP request mes-
sage to the server using the HTTP protocol, and expects to receive a response
message from the server. The basic message exchange pattern is illustrated in
Fig. 3. The server stores content or provides resources, which it delivers to the cli-
ent.

Fig. 3. Catalogue Service for the Web.

There are two ways for encoding request and response messages of the CSW.
First, they can be encoded as pairs of keywords (request parameters) and values
within the URL address of the server. This method is called Keyword-Value Pairs
(KVP). Secondly, they can be encoded using XML, an industry standard for the
exchange of data on Internet. CSW client’s requests can also be included in a
framework based on messages such as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP),
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which is a protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the im-

plementation of web services in computer networks and relies on XML for its
message format and other application protocols, such as HTTP, for message nego-
tiation and transmission.
HTTP protocol supports several methods for submitting requests to the server.
HTTP protocol binding for the CSW only uses GET and POST methods. Former
means that parameters and data that are sent are encoded into a URL, and is ba-
sically for just getting (retrieving) data, while the latter means that the parame-
ters and data are sent within a message body and may involve anything, such as
storing or updating data. Table 1 lists CSW requests and their allowed methods in
HTTP protocol binding (GET or POST), as well as method of data encoding (KVP
or XML). These requests will be described in detail in the following.

Table 1. CSW requests and HTTP method bindings.

Request HTTP method bindings Data encodings

GetCapabilities GET (POST) KVP (XML)

DescribeRecord POST (GET) XML (KVP)

GetDomain POST (GET) XML (KVP)

GetRecords POST (GET) XML (KVP)

GetRecordById GET (POST) KVP (XML)

Harvest POST (GET) XML (KVP)

Transaction POST XML

The GetCapabilities is a mandatory operation that allows CSW clients to receive

service metadata from a server. The response to a GetCapabilities request is an
XML document that contains service metadata about the CSW server. This XML
document describes the capabilities of the CSW service.
The DescribeRecord is a mandatory operation that allows CSW clients to find the
elements of the information model supported by the target catalogue service. This
operation allows the individual parts or the entire information model (metadata
schema) to be described. The response to this request is XML metadata schema
that describes the appropriate record that is requested.
The optional GetDomain operation is used to obtain runtime information about
the range of values of a metadata record element or request parameter. The
runtime range of values for a property or request parameter is usually much
smaller than the value space for that property or parameter based on its type defi-
nition. This type of runtime information about the range of values of a property
or request parameter may be useful for generating user interfaces with meaning-
ful lists from which the user can select one or more values. This operation does
not always give accurate results.
Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334 321

The mandatory GetRecords operation is used for searching and presenting infor-
mation from the catalogue. The searching part of the GetRecords operation is en-
coded using the Query element. The Query element includes the parameters that
specify which entities from the information model of the catalogue are queried,
and may also specify which query constraints shall be applied to identify the re-
quest set. It is specified using OGC Filter specification (URL 17). The presenting
part of the GetRecords indicates which schema i.e. information model (ISO 19115,
ebRIM…) is used to generate the response to the GetRecords operation and which
properties of that schema should be included in each record in the GetRecords
response.
The mandatory GetRecordById request retrieves the catalogue records using
their identifier. In order for this operation to be performed a previous query
has to be performed in order to obtain the identifiers that may be used with
this operation. For example, records returned by a GetRecords operation may con-
tain references to other records (its identifier) in the catalogue that may be re-
trieved using the GetRecordById operation. This operation is a subset of the
GetRecords operation and is suitable for retrieving and linking to records in a
catalogue.
There are two optional operations that may be used to insert, delete or update
records in the catalogue: Transaction and Harvest. The Transaction operation
is used to “push” data into the catalogue whereas the Harvest operation “pulls”
data into the catalogue. That is, this operation only references the data to be in-
serted or updated in the catalogue, and the catalogue service should resolve the
reference, fetch that data, and process it into the catalogue, immediately or later
depending of the mode of operation (synchronous and asynchronous).
Fig. 4 shows a conceptual architecture that illustrates the relationship of CSW in-
terfaces to metadata consumers and producers. The arrows show the CSW re-
quests that producers and consumers of metadata can generate. For example, in
order to create metadata, metadata producer may invoke Transaction or Harvest
request. Similarly, the user of metadata may invoke GetRecords request to per-
form queries on the catalog.

Fig. 4. CSW conceptual architecture.

The following examples illustrate GetCapabilities, DescribeRecord and

GetRecords requests. In each request the part before the symbol “?” represents
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the address of the service, whereas the other part represents parameters of
the service expressed as keyword-value pairs. The order of parameters is arbi-
trary.

The GetCapabilities request example is as follows:

Listing 1. The GetCapabilities request.

Parameters of this request are:

• REQUEST – the type of request to the CSW, in this case GetCapabilities, it is a
mandatory paremeter;
• service – the type of service, in this case CSW, it is a mandatory pareme-
ter;
• version – the version of the service, in this case it is the CSW service version
2.0.2, it is a mandatory paremeter.

The DescribeRecord request example is as follows:

Listing 2. The DescribeRecord request.

Parameters of this request are the same as the parameters of the GetCapabilities
request with the additional parameter:
• TypeName – a list of type names that are to be described by the catalogue. It is a
mandatory paremeter. In this example, the request demends a whole metadata
schema according to the ISO 19115 / ISO 19139 standard.

The KVP GetRecords request example is as follows:

Listing 3. The KVP GetRecords request.

Parameters of this request are the same as the parameters of the GetCapabilities
request with the additional parameter:
• typeNames – a list of one or more names of entities, from the information
model of the catalogue, that will be queried. It is a mandatory pareme-
ter. In this example, the request demends all metadata records from the cata-
logue.
Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334 323

The XML GetRecords request is as follows:

Listing 4. The XML GetRecords request.

This example is similar to the previous one except it has a constraint

(<csw:Constraint>) defined using OGC filter encoding (<ogc:Filter>) which
specifies that the title of the data set must be equal to “Cadastral municipalities”
(<ogc:PropertyIsEqualTo>). Therefore, this request does not return all the
metadata records as the previous one, but only those metadata records that con-
tain the title equal to “Cadastral municipalities”.

2.3. Application Profiles and Catalogue Implementations

The notion of application profile has been defined in ISO TR 10000-1:1998 (URL
18) which specifies a general framework for functional standardization. An appli-
cation profile may be developed from one or more base specifications in order to
address particular needs or requirements. It should also specify conformance
tests to check compliance to the base specifications, because an application profile
must not contradict the base specifications. An application profile also specifies
the use of an application-layer protocol such as HTTP in order to provide the
transfer of information between systems.
The general OGC catalogue model defines common behaviors and interfaces that
have general utility, but in practice there is no single solution that will satisfy ev-
eryone’s needs. Therefore, OGC has developed several application profiles of the
general OGC catalogue model in order to satisfy specific implementation commu-
nities. These communities use application profiles as standards for conformance.
The general OGC catalogue model is a platform-neutral specification, whereas ap-
plication profiles are platform-specific. They are bound to a particular distributed
computing protocol, in this case they use one of the protocol bindings defined in
the catalogue specification. The relationships between base specifications, appli-
cation profiles, and catalogue service implementations are illustrated in Fig. 5.
The platform-neutral specification is one of the base specifications with which the
application profile complies, and a given catalogue implementation conforms to
one or more application profiles.
324 Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334

Fig. 5. Relationships between base specifications, profiles, and implementations.

Catalogue implementations specialize the general OGC catalogue model through

protocol bindings and application profiles. They are constrained by the protocol
bindings of the catalogue specification. Each protocol binding includes a mapping
from the general interfaces, operations, and parameters specified in the general
OGC catalogue model to the constructs available in a chosen protocol. Application
profiles further specialize the implementation of these interfaces and their opera-
tions, including adding classes and parameters. However, they are specializations
of parental protocol bindings and the names of the operations and parameters
cannot be changed. An application profile is based on one of the protocol bindings
in the base specification and in the case of the Catalogue Services Specification it
may be CORBA/IIOP, Z39.50, or the HTTP protocol binding. The relationship of
general model, protocol binding and application profile is shown in Fig. 6.

Fig. 6. Relationship of general model, protocol binding, and application profile.

OGC has developed several application profiles including:

• OpenGIS Catalogue Services Specification 2.0.2 – ISO Metadata Application
Profile (1.0.0) (URL 19) – this application profile implements ISO 19115/ISO
19139 information model
• CSW-ebRIM Registry Service – Part 1: ebRIM profile of CSW (1.0.1) (URL 20) –
this application profile implements ebXML Registry Information Model
• Catalogue Services Standard 2.0 Extension Package for ebRIM Application Pro-
file: Earth Observation Products (URL 21) – it describes the mapping of Earth
Observation products, defined in the OGC GML 3.1.1 Application schema for
Earth Observation products (URL 22), to an ebRIM structure within an OGC
Catalogue 2.0. implementing the CSW-ebRIM Registry Service – part 1: ebRIM
profile of CSW. This standard defines the way Earth Observation products me-
tadata resources are organized and implemented in the catalogue for discovery,
retrieval and management.
• OGC Catalogue Services – OWL Application Profile of CSW (0.3.0) (URL 23) –
this application profile is proposed in the discussion paper and has not yet
become the implementation standard. It uses OWL as information model.
Bai et al. (2009) proposed geospatial service taxonomies to represent the know-
ledge about the characteristics of geospatial services with the aim of promoting
the global sharing of and interoperability among geospatial service instances. It is
a hierarchical taxonomy consisting of six layers: service category, service type,
Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334 325

version, profile, binding and uniform resource name. In this way the problem
of various application profiles may be solved and increased interoperability
achieved.
There are several proprietary and open source solutions that implement some of
the OGC catalogue application profiles. They also provide the ability to create
metadata for the geospatial resources according to various information models:
• GeoNetwork opensource (URL 24) is a web based geographic metadata catalogue
application. It implements the ISO19115/19139 Geographic Metadata, Z39.50,
CSW 2.0.2 and OGC WMS standards among others.
• Deegree Web Catalogue Service (CSW) (URL 25) is a software package that im-
plements the OGC Catalogue Service Implementation Specification 2.0.2 and
ISO 19115/19119 Application Profile 1.0.0.
• ESRI ArcCatalog (URL 26) is part of ArcGIS development environment for geo-
graphic information systems. ArcCatalog is used for cataloging all GIS resources
within an organization and provides basic information about each of them. It al-
so allows the creation and update of metadata for each GIS resource according to
ISO 19115.
• ERDAS APOLLO Catalog (URL 27) offers a CSW compliant view on the content
of the ERDAS APOLLO Catalog. The preferred OGC registry information model
is based on the ebXML registry information model, ebRIM Application Profile
for CSW.

3. Using OGC Catalogue Services in Geodetic-Cadastral Information Systems

OGC services are becoming more and more popular in organizations that are
dealing with spatial data, such as real estate cadastre, urban planning, environ-
mental protection agencies, agriculture stations etc. These organizations recog-
nized the benefit of OGC open architecture and seamless data distribution and in-
tegration and many are in the process of implementing services such as OGC
WMS, WFS and WCS. However, the usefulness of catalogue services has not yet
been entirely recognized. Many find describing their geospatial resources with
metadata rather tedious and time consuming task. Therefore, catalogues often
contain only basic metadata, such as name or spatial extent, which is not very in-
formative in resource discovery, especially for external users. Therefore it is
necessary to introduce documenting data into organization’s practice. The other
problem of using OGC catalogue services in spatial information systems such as
Geodetic-cadastral information system is the problem of the semantics of data. In
order to effectively use metadata catalogues, users need to see the details of the
underlying data model.

3.1. The Role of Metadata Catalogues in Geodetic-Cadastral Information System

According to the Law on State Survey and Cadastre (URL 28) Geodetic-cadastral
information system consists of subsystems that contain data and services for the
basic geodetic works, real estate cadastre, the address register, register of spatial
units, the register of geographical names, network utility cadastre, topo-
326 Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334

graphic-cartographic data and other data. It provides data collection, manage-

ment, maintenance, access and use of sub-systems, on the principles of:
• keeping data in one referent place and facilitate access and exchange at various
levels within an organization;
• creating and maintaining metadata about data and services to facilitate its
discovery;
• defining data and services in compliance with national and international stan-
dards;
• allowing the users outside the organization to access information via web servi-
ces;
• facilitating issuance of documents in electronic or other form;
• security of electronic business transactions for the use of data and services that
require a fee;
• providing safeguards for information system in all phases of operation.
Digital geodetic plan is a spatial information system which consists of four basic
components: data, software, hardware and users who provide the collection, pro-
cessing, maintenance, analysis and distribution of content. It is a subsystem of
geodetic information system, and can be implemented as a separate system. Digi-
tal geodetic plan consists of the following themes: geodetic reference, cadastral
parcels, parts of cadastral parcels according to land use, buildings, names and
textual descriptions, network utilities, spatial units, elevation model of terrain,
topography, unclassified. Digital cadastral plan, Digital network utility plan and
Digital topographic plan consist of the subset of the themes from Digital geodetic
plan. Data are distributed using standard vector and raster formats. Metadata
descriptions are necessary to facilitate data distribution.
In the following, examples of metadata descriptions of cadastral plan in vector
and raster format according to ISO 19115 standard will be shown. Metadata for a
cadastral plan in vector format may include a description of the entire dataset or
individual feature types or attributes. Metadata information about vector data
will include several categories of information. Information about metadata in-
cludes name of the metadata set, language of metadata, metadata author, etc.
Identification information includes title of the dataset, abstract, purpose, status,
point of contact, category of data, keywords, etc. It is also necessary to document
update frequency and maintenance of data, legal constraints, spatial resolution –
scale and spatial and temporal extent. Data quality information contains infor-
mation about data lineage and its completeness, logical consistency, thematic,
positional and temporal accuracy. Metadata about vector data may also include
reference to the application schema i.e. data model, feature catalogue that lists all
the features in the dataset and portrayal catalogue which contains symbols for
visualization of features in dataset and is used for data visualization on the maps.
Listing 5 contains an extract of metadata description for cadastral plan repre-
sented as vector. Spatial representation info section contains information rele-
vant for the vector spatial representation. Reference system info section contains
an identifier of the coordinate reference system or its parameters. Identification
info section contains the type of spatial representation, in this case vector, geo-
graphic bounding box, etc. Distribution section contains information about data
formats for the distribution, online resources such as WMS, etc.
Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334 327

Listing 5. Metadata description of vector data.

The similar metadata description may be given for raster data. The main
difference is the spatial representation information which includes grid spatial
representation and can be divided in georectified and georeferencable grid.
Georectified grid is a grid whose cells are regularly spaced in a geographic or map
coordinate system defined in the spatial referencing system so that any cell in the
grid can be geolocated given its grid coordinate and the grid origin, cell spacing,
and orientation. Georeferencable grid is a grid with cells irregularly spaced in any
given geographic or map projection coordinate system, whose individual cells can
be geolocated using geolocation information supplied with the data but cannot be
geolocated from the grid properties alone. Spatial representation information
includes properties of the grid such as number of dimensions, axis properties, cell
geometry, availability of check points and transformation parameters, etc. The
following listing shows extract of metadata for raster data in ISO 19115 format.
Information about reference system, bounding box and distribution are similar as
in previous example. The difference can be observed for spatial representation in-
formation which gives details of the grid.
This sort of information enables discovery and retrieval of data according to title,
abstract, keywords, spatial and temporal extent, categories, themes, etc. It
answers the “what, where, when, why, who, and how” questions about geospatial
328 Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334

Listing 6. Metadata description of raster data.

resources. ISO 19115 also specifies Core metadata set which is a basic minimum
number of metadata elements that should be maintained for a dataset in order
to identify a dataset for catalogue purposes. It includes mandatory metadata
elements as well as recommended optional elements which will increase
interoperability, allowing users to understand the geographic data and the related
metadata provided by either the producer or the distributor
Metadata catalogues may facilitate retrieval of the themes and features of the
Digital geodetic plan. However, the retrieval of the data is only based on
keyword-based search, and the part concerning the semantics of the data is still
missing and the user is not able to see the details about underlying data model.
Retrieval of the data should consider feature attributes which can be spatial,
thematic, qualitative and temporal. Although application schema may be
referenced in metadata set, the problems of heterogeneity of formats for its
representation, as well the meaning of schema elements persist and therefore it is
not suitable for the any kind of automatic processing.
Record orientation of catalogues as in ISO 19115, is a clear user / client paradigm
but it is hard to maintain and limited for complex metadata relationships. A
registry model makes catalogs easier and more flexible to maintain, but it is
rather complex when exposed to the clients. ebRIM allows the classification of
data and services into categories which only partially solves the problem of
Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334 329

semantics by introducing taxonomy, but non-taxonomic relationships are hard to

maintain. Possible solution for the problem is the introduction of formal
ontologies, namely OWL, a semantic markup language for the web. This approach
is described in the next section.

3.2. Introducing Semantics into OGC Catalogues

Ontology is a formal representation of the knowledge by a set of concepts within a
domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about
the properties of that domain, and may be used to describe the domain. Its role is
to provide a shared vocabulary within a certain domain such as the real estate ca-
dastre. The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) specified in ISO 19152
standard (URL 29) provides a base for building ontologies in real estate cadastre
domain. ISO 19152 is an international standard from ISO 19100 series of stan-
dards. Since the land administration is a large field, the focus of this standard is
on that part of land administration that is interested in rights, responsibilities
and restrictions affecting land, and the geometrical (spatial) components thereof.
LADM contains a reference model that has two goals. First goal is to avoid rein-
venting and re-implementing the same functionality over and over again. There-
fore, this standard offers basis for data model that can be expanded and adapted
in order to develop an accurate data model. Second goal is to enable involved par-
ties, both within one country and between different countries, to communicate,
based on the shared vocabulary (that is, an ontology) implied by the model.
Based on the degree of generality, ontologies can be divided into three levels
(Guarino 1998): top-level ontologies, domain ontologies, and application ontologies.
Top-level ontologies describe the general concepts independent of domain, for
example, object or event. Domain ontologies describe the concepts in a generic
domain. Application ontologies are related to a specific domain or task that is in-
tended for use in one application rather than across many applications. In geo-
spatial domain ontology architecture has been provided in (Zhao et al. 2009).
According to this approach ontologies are divided into six layers as shown in Fig. 7.

Fig. 7. Ontology architecture.

General ontology is the core upper level vocabulary representing common human
consensus reality that all other ontologies must reference and it is domain inde-
pendent. Geospatial feature ontology provides the core geospatial vocabulary and
330 Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334

structure, and forms the ontological foundation of geospatial information and

should be coordinated with geospatial standards such as ISO 19100 series and
OGC. Geospatial factor and relationship ontologies describe location, unit conver-
sion factors and geospatial and logical relationships between geospatial features.
Geospatial domain specific ontology represents the specific concepts in one do-
main such as land administration. Geospatial data ontology provides a dataset
description. Geospatial service ontology semantically describes the service using
OWL-S (URL 30). Considering the traditional division into upper, domain and
application ontologies, general ontology corresponds to upper ontology, next three
layers correspond to domain ontologies while the part that relates to information
and services belongs to application ontologies.
In order to build ontologies an open source ontology editor Protégé (URL 31) may
be used. It has capabilities to build ontology in the OWL language and visualize
taxonomies of OWL ontologies. It is the tool for OWL-based ontology development
and inference; it is extensible via plug-ins (Knublauch et al. 2004). Protégé has its
own internal representation mechanism for ontologies and knowledge bases,
based on a metamodel, which is comparable to object-oriented and frame-based
systems.
Cadastral domain ontology should be developed in accordance with ISO 19152
standard. This ontology should be related to Geospatial feature ontology
developed in accordance with ISO 19100 series of standards. Cadastral domain
ontology is the part of Geospatial Domain-specific Ontology and represents a
shared vocabulary for the domain of the real estate cadastre. Extension of this
ontology according to LADM profile for the national cadastre is at the application
level when the goal is the integration of international cadastral data, although
within the state it may be considered to be at the domain level. This ontology
structure is shown on Fig. 8. Therefore, ontology for any national cadastre should
be developed according to data model for the real estate cadastre in that country
and should be aligned to LADM ontology. The example has been given in
(Boškoviæ et al. 2010).

Fig. 8. Ontology dependency.

Examples of the OWL classes from the LADM and the national cadastre
ontologies have been given in the following listing. Listing 3.a shows the descrip-
tion of the OWL class LA_SubParcel in N3 notation. This class is related with
the class LA_Parcel via existential and universal restriction on property
isPartOfParcel, which specifies that the subparcel must be related to particular
parcel i.e. if subparcel exists it must be the part of a particular parcel. Listing 3.b
shows the OWL class Building. This class is the subclass of the OWL class
LA_Building and it is related to PartOfParcel. This relation indicates that a
building must be placed at exactly one part of parcel. OWL classes with the prefix
LA_ belong to the LADM ontology, whereas other classes belong to the national
cadastre ontology.
Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334 331

Listing 7. a) OWL Class LA_SubParcel, b) OWL Class Building.

Ordinary OGC catalogues can be enhanced with such semantic information,

which will enable users to discover and retrieve data based on semantics of the
data model as well. This can be achieved by incorporating semantic annotations
into metadata as described in OGC discussion paper (URL 32). This discussion
paper proposes semantic annotation at three different levels: geospatial service
metadata, data models and process descriptions, and actual data instances in the
database. In order to process such information new catalogue clients need to be
developed, but the existing clients can be used for processing ordinary metadata
ignoring semantic extensions. A proposal how to semantically enhance OGC cata-
logues has been given in (Lutz and Klien 2006).

4. Conclusions
One of the essential components for the construction of a spatial data infra-
structure at a regional, national or global level is the geospatial catalogue service.
But, for the catalogue to be a useful component, it must enable access to
geospatial metadata independently of the nature of search client applications.
Client applications do not need to be developed by the same company or same
technology that implemented the server. This is achieved by OGC Catalogue spe-
cification which various vendors must comply in order to achieve interoperability
and make possible this enterprise and technological independence. This paper re-
views General catalogue model, various information models that can be imple-
mented, different protocol bindings, among which the most common is HTTP
protocol binding which enables web interface and application profiles that com-
bines various information models and protocol bindings. The analysis of the
usage of metadata catalogue services in geodetic information systems has been
given. The problem of the semantics of data has been discussed and the proposal
for a possible solution for improvement based on ontologies has been made. It is
necessary to develop these ontologies in accordance with OGC and ISO 19100
series of standards and data model.
332 Govedarica, M. i dr.: Metadata Catalogues in Spatial Information …, Geod. list 2010, 4, 313–334

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Katalog metapodataka u prostornim

informacijskim sustavima
SAETAK. U radu je prikazan kratki pregled usluga kataloga metapodataka Otvore-
noga geoprostornog konzorcija (OGC) koji ima kljuènu ulogu u otkrivanju geoprostor-
nih izvora informacija u Prostornoj infrastrukturi podataka (SDI). Pojam Prostorne
infrastrukture podataka obuhvaæa skup tehnologija, strategija i institucionalnih spo-
razuma koji osiguravaju lakši pristup geoprostornim podacima. SDI je pogodan za
upotrebu pri otkrivanju geoprostornih podataka, evaluaciji, kao i razlièitim primjena-
ma unutar vladinog, komercijalnog i neprofitabilnog sektora, akademskih institucija,
itd. Usluge kataloga metapodataka specificirane su u OGC Specifikaciji ostvarivanja
usluga kataloga. Dio specifikacije koji se odnosi na web-suèelje koje podrava pohra-
nu, uèitavanje i upravljanje podacima koji se odnose na web-servise naziva se Kata-
loški servis za web (CSW). Katalozi metapodataka su agenti za usluge koji predstav-
ljaju kljuènu komponentu u arhitekturi namijenjenoj uslugama, a koja upravlja za-
jednièkim izvorima i olakšava otkrivanje izvora unutar otvorenoga distribuiranog su-
stava. OGC usluge stekle su znaèajnu popularnost u proteklim godinama, a broj orga-
nizacija koje ih koriste se poveæao. Meðutim, puni potencijal kataloga metapodataka
još nije dostignut, ne samo zbog nedostatka odgovarajuæe dokumentacije podataka u
obliku standardiziranih metapodataka, veæ i zbog nedostatka semantike podataka.
Napravljena je analiza korištenja usluga kataloga metapodataka u geodetskim infor-
macijskim sustavima te je dan prijedlog za moguæa rješenja u svrhu poboljšanja.

Kljuène rijeèi: OGC katalog, CSW, prostorni informacijski sustavi, metapodaci, se-
mantika.

Prihvaæeno: 2010-11-05