The Record is the atomic unit of information in a catalog. The record model provides a minimal set of information to facilitate the discovery of the resource it points to (e.g.: discovery metadata). This includes some generic properties such as title, description, formats, but also information about when it was created and who created it. These properties are called queryables , as they can be used to query searchable catalogs.

As in other OGC API Standards, there are no mandatory encodings. Servers are free to choose their offerings and clients are expected to use content negotiation to retrieve a suitable format.

The record model was intentionally kept simple, so that it could be used by non metadata experts. It has only one mandatory field and a few optional fields. It is anticipated that it will be extended by information communities who wish to add more content about their resources (e.g.: Machine Learning, Earth Observation).

This is an example of a metadata record that uses some optional fields from the atomic model and extends it with more fields that are relevant for the use case.

A record collection (also called catalog ) describes a group of related resources, which could be metadata records but also features, coverages or another type of geospatial information.

The Records API specifies how to interact with the catalog and request specific records. It is based on the principles of reusability, borrowing a lot of what was defined in OGC API - Features .

The collection and items endpoints can be extended with additional parameters to enable querying. For instance, the items endpoint can be queried using a bounding box, a time frame of even free text. For more advanced query scenarios with complex filter expressions of logically connected query predicates, the Common Query Language (CQL) can be used.

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