As large repositories of EO data become increasingly available, the ability to search across these repositories and archives of data is paramount importance to address the geospatial data and metadata explosion.

Distributed search requires standard for metadata encodings, and behaviour of how to delegate requests against remote catalogues. In addition, metadata mappings and crosswalks are critical when attempting to harmonize across metadata standards as part of real-time distributed search.

This presentation will provide an overview of recent work in pycsw in the context of the ESA EOEPCA project, as well as updates to the OGC API - Records standard to add formal specification of this behaviour.