GBIF Metadata Catalogue

This GBIF Metadata Catalogue is a software component that will enable GBIF to promote and participate in the sharing of dataset-level metadata published in commonly used standards such as Ecological Metadata Language (EML) or ISO 19139. Large distributed networks such as GBIF's that bring together many providers and consumers of data can be characterised as a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) where consumers discover providers and their services, and loosely coupled system components can be orchestrated as needed to serve particular cases. In an SOA, the key activities of inventory, discovery and access to data and services must be well coordinated through the provision of registries and metadata catalogues, and through the generation of specific indexes. Metadata are thus a central component in an expanded GBIF network.