CSW2LD: a Linked Data frontend for CSW

Catalogues are at the core of Spatial Data Infrastructures. The most noticeable catalogue specification in the geospatial domain is the Catalogue Services specification issued by the Open Geospatial Consortium. That specification defines a set of abstract interfaces for the discovery, access, maintenance and organization of metadata repositories of geospatial information in distributed computing scenarios, such as the Web. In particular, the specification defines a HTTP protocol binding named Catalogue Service for the Web or CSW. The standard is complex and requires specialized clients. The Web of Data is an alternative approach to the publication of data and metadata on the Web that enables the use of generic clients and the mix of information from different domains. This paper proposes the CSW2LD Server as a solution for publishing on the Web as Linked Data the content of metadata repositories offered through the CSW protocol.