<p>Jody, </p>
<p>Could'nt follow all details of your post but you hit one of the core problems of modeling geo-information and services, namely relationships, especially mutual relationship between these. </p>
<p>> Relationship to the OGC CSW 2.0 specification: the GeoTools catalog<br>> strongly models the containment relationship between Service and<br>> GeoSpatial information. All other associations are handled "implicitly"
<br>> when working with a reference to a geospatial resource.</p>
<p>To me geo-information and services have a many-to-many relationship. When there is a containment relationship with data access services containing geo-information (which is OK for an API) and a set of containers you obviously can compute reverse associations to re-establish this many-to-many relationship in a libary behind an API.
</p>
<p>As you know, I am trying to reach consensus about a minimal information metadata model (to all: I'm still awaiting comments or counter proposals to <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://tinyurl.com/kfkyv" target="_blank">
http://tinyurl.com/kfkyv</a>). So I like to give my 0.25 pennies to this open problem:</p>
<div>Having the use case of minimal metadata exchange - not the API - in mind, I'm strongly proposing a containment relationship of geo-information containing zero to many data access services (data binding protocols). </div>
<div> </div>
<div>Consider also the fact that geodata can exist without data access services but data access services can't. In addition, I'm making a difference between data access services (as mentioned above) and 'services on it's own' like filter or label placement services. Here I think there is no solution out yet because these 'services on it's own' wouldn't contain associations to specific geodata (= data access services) but would try to describe kinds and structures of geodata they can process.
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<p>So to me, when looking for the best approach to auto-discover and publish geo-information, I'd like to ask the following questions: </p>
<div>
<div>* What's easier for webcrawlers: find data sets (or metadata about it) or services? </div>
<div>* What do data providers more likely do (if they do): register data sets or metadata about it containing some data access services or services (containing many views to data sets)?</div></div>
<div>* And finally: What is easier to describe in a minimal metadata model: data sets or data access services? </div>
<p>-- Stefan</p>