Examples of operational catalog web applications. The vision is that a standardized metadata publication/search service would reduce significatly the amount of resources devoted to developing these "strongly coupled search applications". The web page is effectively a software application, and most of these are bound to a single database (metadata register) through a custom interface.

A standardized catalog service interface should support the functionality implemented by these:

MERCURY- Distributed Metadata Management, Data Discovery and Access System Oak Ridge National Laboratory; this is the home of the National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) portal

Mirador--Earth Science Data Search (NASA)

Mining Research Library Global mining and minerals library

OnePetro.org is a multi-society library that provides a simple way to search for and access a broad range of technical literature related to the oil and gas exploration and production industry.

National Geologic Map Database (NGMDB) map catalog USGS

Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory data access

George Mason GeoBrain Portal for Searching GEOSS services and components
ESRI Geoportal Toolkit portal for GEOSS

SIOExplorer Digital Library Project, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Geological Data Center, Data, documents and images from 822 expeditions by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

GEON portal

Earthscope data portal

USGS Mineral resources spatial data. Catalog interface makes extensive use of controlled vocabularies as opposed to user-entered text.

British Columbia Geographic data discovery service

MarCoast -- Marine and coastal Environmental Information Services. Three year GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) project funded by the European Space Agency with the aim of establishing a durable network of marine and coastal information services. You can find more information about this project at www.gmes-marcoast.com. Implemented using GeoNetwork.

Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory Database Catalog

National Park Service Data Store

EDINA, University of Edinburgh geo-portal