Background
The National Environmental Information Infrastructure (NEII) Catalogue provides metadata on selected environmental data and services supported by the Bureau of Meteorology and other Australian Government agencies. The metadata conform to the Australian Spatial Information Council's ANZLIC Metadata profile of AS/NZS ISO 19115:2005 Geographic information - Metadata (PDF).
Metadata from other agencies are regularly harvested from their repositories by the Bureau as part of its role in improving discovery, accessibility and use of environmental information. While the Bureau coordinates the federation of these metadata, it does not validate the metadata provided from other agencies. Users of the information should refer to the metadata contact details when initiating queries about individual metadata records.
Searching
The Bureau uses the open source application GeoNetwork to store metadata. Searching is implemented in GeoNetwork by indexing text in the metadata records using Apache Lucene and providing an Open Geospatial Consortium Catalogue Service for the Web (OGC-CSW 2.0.2 - PDF) interface to allow searches. Text searching supports the use of '%' as a multi character wild-card, and '?' as a single character wildcard, in target search strings. Search strings are case insensitive. Records titles are displayed in the search results and details of individual records can be viewed in XML format.
