The following are the ESIP Federation Inter-Operability catalog function descriptions.

Desired Features and Attributes:
 

1. Provide for local and network-based discovery (browsing) of on-line or off-line geospatial information resources in a distributed heterogeneous computing environment.

 
2. Provide operations for creating and maintaining catalogs and catalog entries.

 
3. Provide operations for discovering the content and structure of geospatial resources.

 
4. Allow use of metadata entities, elements, and sections:

• defined in FGDC CSDGM plus CGMD, for both collection (series) and inventory records.

• extending (ie creating user defined) metadata.

• D ocumenting processing history or lineage

1. Provide for query (or selection) operations supporting discovery and access:

• querying metadata elements having spatial, temporal, text, and/or numeric values,

• use of metadata element names and values (e.g., spatial, temporal, numeric, keyword, and other types) in the query predicate,

• use of Boolean operations (e.g., and, or, not) between search terms in the query predicate,

• use of spatial query operations (e.g., intersect, contains, contained by, within, beyond, etc.) as predicates of a query expression (as search terms in the query predicate),

• returning complex data structures and/or objects,

• delivering identity of resources (e.g., catalogs and feature collections) as a result of query.

1. Provide access operations for retrieval of complete or partial forms of geodata resources, including:

• geospatial datasets,

• feature collections,

• features,

• metadata sets,

• metadata entities.

1. Provide operations for creating and maintaining collections of geospatial datasets, including a metadata set and metadata entities associated with each stored dataset.

 
2. Provide operations for recording and checking the accessibility and retrieval status of geospatial datasets.

 
3. Allow the use of multibyte character sets for all interfaces (ISO/IEC 10646-1, Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS))

 
4. Facilitate ordering of data on or offline

 
5. Minimize re-creation of existing catalogs/metadata stores and mangement tools

 
6. Utilize available COTS/GOTS solutions where possible

 
7. Enable concurrent interrogation of multiple, distributed catalogs using a single query

 
8. Support aggregation and ranking of results

 
9. Provide searching by data type and specificity

Specifications

1. Protocol

 
2. Source availability

 
3. Platforms supported

 
4. License costs

 
5. Current useage

 
6. Standards used

 
7. Language

 
8. DCE

 
9. Catalogfile format

1. Efficiency and performance

 
2. Cost of implementation

 
3. Timeliness of implementation

 
4. Adequacy of documentation

 
5. Integration into existing systems

 
6. Accessibility to users:

• NASA Researchers

• other ESIP sites

• General public users

1. Security