CSW is one part (or "profile") of the OGC Catalogue Service, which defines common interfaces to discover, browse, and query metadata about data, services, and other potential resources.
Typically the records include Dublin Core, ISO 19139 or FGDC metadata, encoded in UTF-8 characters.
Each record must contain certain core fields including: Title, Format, Type (e.g. Dataset, DatasetCollection or Service), BoundingBox (a rectangle of interest, expressed in latitude and longitude), Coordinate Reference System, and Association (a link to another metadata record).
Operations defined by the CSW standard include:[1][3] Requests can encode the parameters in three different ways: Responses are in XML.
An example of the DescribeRecord operation is as follows:[4] A (truncated) response: Versions 2.0.0, 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 are subtly different, and different vendors implement them with variations.