Exposing CSW Catalogues as Linked Data

The OpenGIS Catalogue Services (CS) specification defines a set of abstract interfaces for the discovery, access, maintenance and organization of metadata repositories of geospatial information and related resources in distributed computing scenarios, such as the Web. The CS specification also defines a HTTP protocol binding, which is called “Catalogue Services for the Web” or CSW. A fair description of CSW is a remote catalogue interface over the HTTP protocol, but not over the architecture of the mainstream Web where search engines are the users’ gateway to information. This paper identifies some aspects of CSW that difficult the findability of metadata in the Web, and hence, the discovery of resources. This paper also presents a toolkit that exposes as Linked Data the content of metadata repositories offered through CSW with the purpose of improving the discovery of metadata records in search engines.