The USGIN CSW Client is a user interface that allows ArcMap users to easily make Catalog Service for the Web (CSW) requests.

Catalog services are web services that organize and query metadata records, specifically metadata records describing web services that have been registered with a given catalog service (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The relationship between the CSW Client and web services that have been registered with a given catalog service

Catalog service requests return capabilities documents: XML documents describing the capabilities of a given web service. Capabilities documents can be accessed via web browsers.

The USGIN CSW Client queries specific catalog services for capabilities documents according to user-specified search terms. The CSW Client validates the resulting documents, interprets them, sifts through them, and presents the user with a list of web services that meet the search terms. These web services can then be loaded into ArcMap as layers.

Catalog services accessible via the CSW Client are as follows:

• The NGDS Catalog (http://search.geothermaldatasystem.org/)
• The OneGeology Catalog (http://portal.onegeology.org/)
• The Geo.Data.Gov Catalog (http://geo.data.gov/geoportal/catalog/main/home.page)

The CSW Client uses the FGDC Service Status Checker to validate the schema of capabilities documents returned by the client.

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