[[overview]]
== Overview

This main content of this engineering report is divided into three clauses.

The first clause, titled Web IntegrationService, defines the resources, 
operations and responses of a new OGC service that can be considered an
aggregation point -- for the purpose of discovery -- for a suite of OGC
web services.

The second clause, titled Associations and the GetAssociations operations,
defines a new, generic, OGC operation named GetAssociations.  This clause
defines an XML-encoding and KVP-encoding for a GetAssociations operation 
suitable for use with the KVP-GET, XML-POST and SOAP OGC service bindings. 
This clause also defines an associations resource that is suitable for use 
with a service that implements a REST style architecture.

The third clause, titled Catalogue extensions, defines a CSW-ebRIM extension
package that allows a catalogue to use the web integration service and the
GetAssociations operation/resource to harvest a much broader set of metadata
about a service than is currently available through the capabilities document
alone thus support rich discovery.

