[OpenLayers-Dev] WMSManager beta version

["RIVIERE Robert - CETE Méditerr./DI/ETER"]

> An OGC Catalogue Service (CAT) [1] interface should be the best solution 
> IMO.

Oh yes you are quite right. 
In fact, I'm actually working on a geographic metadata cataloguing project, and as far as I know, OGC-CAT has been superseeded by OGC-CSW2, which is waaay a lot more complex. In particular, CSW2 is an abstract standard and you have to specify your own profile. 2 profiles are in competition to be standardized, the ebRIM profile and the ISO profile. As I believe I'm beggining to understand the ISO profile, ebRIM profile is totally out of reach for me. 
And you'll also have to master ISO 19115 norm, ISO 19139 xml implementation, ISO 19119 services, OGC query language and/or CQL, ... etc..
If you want to be able to update your catalog, you should also implement transactionnal operators.
All this to say it could be the ideal solution but this is a big game.

In my mind, for the particular needs of retrieving some WMS servers URLS and their capabilites, we could rely on something much simpler.
The example already given here : http://www.microimages.com/wmscatalog/request.cgi? sends XML output. I was wondering if this output was somewhere standardized ?

Robert