The EOEPCA Resource Catalogue (RC) is a core component of the architecture, whose purpose is to register EO metadata (data sources or processing results) and provide search APIs for discovery and search by downstream clients (web applications, desktop GIS, etc.). The EOEPCA RC implements numerous industry standard metadata and search specifications (OGC Catalogue Service for the Web, OpenSearch Geo and Time/EO, OAI-PMH, SRU, ISO 19115, etc.). The Resource Catalogue is powered by pycsw, an open source metadata search server implementation which provides a standards-based metadata and catalogue component of spatial data infrastructures. pycsw is an OGC Reference Implementation and an OSGeo project.
The Resource Catalogue is implemented as a component in the EOEPCA architecture, in the Resource Management domain experts group. As part of metadata registration, to facilitate the EO metadata domain model, pycsw as well as supporting tools (pygeometa, OWSLib) were updated to support the ISO 19115-2 Extensions (for acquisition and processing) standard, as well as the OGC OpenSearch Extension for Earth Observation, supporting the full lifecycle of EO metadata management.
There have been some exciting recent developments. To provide modernized search APIs, EOEPCA Resource Catalogue has implemented OGC API - Records in EOEPCA version 0.9.0, while STAC API support is planned for version 1.0.0. Both of these standards provide modern APIs for easy search and discovery of resources. The EOEPCA RC demo can be found at https://resource-catalogue.demo.eoepca.org.
The EOEPCA RC development team is also working closely with the OGC API - Records Standards Working Group to help develop and evolve the standard, including collaboration with the STAC community to support both APIs. This includes participation in the OGC API Virtual Sprint (21-23 July 2021). If you are interested in metadata and search, please feel free to join us at this week’s sprint!