CSW – Catalogue Service Web API for metadata access

CSW is an open international standard (OGC) comprising interfaces for discovering, browsing and querying metadata about spatial data, services and other resources. The Norwegian Geoportal uses Geonetwork as metadata handling software, with full support for CSW 2.0.

All CSW requests may be used to communicate with metadata in the Norwegian Geoportal. A username and password are needed to upload, edit or delete metadata.

Operations defined by the CSW standard include:

  • GetCapabilities: “allows CSW clients to retrieve service metadata from a server”

  • DescribeRecord: “allows a client to discover elements of the information model supported by the target catalogue service”

  • GetDomain (optional): “used to obtain runtime information about the range of values of a metadata record element or request parameter”

  • GetRecords: search for records, returning record IDs

  • GetRecordById: “retrieves the default representation of catalogue records using their ID”

  • Harvest (optional): create/update metadata by asking the server to ‘pull’ metadata from somewhere

  • Transaction (optional): create/edit metadata by ‘pushing’ the metadata to the server

Requests can encode the parameters in three different ways:

  • GET with URL parameters

  • POST with form-encoded payload

  • POST with XML payload