All over Europe governmental agencies are required by law to publish their environmental datasets as spatial web services (OGC WMS, WFS, etc.). These services are freely accessibly and are a great resource to gather information for a given area of interest.
They are described using metadata records, which are published in metadata catalogues. As known from modern UX design, 3 steps are often 4 steps too many, which is why metadata catalogue search should be integrated in ArcGIS Pro as closely as possible, to be noticed by users. These metadata catalogues can be searched from a website (e.g. INSPIRE Geoportal https://inspire-geoportal.ec.europa.eu/) but they can also be accessed via Web API. The Open Geospatial Consortium offers two standards, the existing CSW standard (https://www.ogc.org/standard/cat/) and the upcoming API Records standard (https://ogcapi.ogc.org/records/) to search for datasets and services in metadata catalogues.
ArcGIS Pro already offers the possibility to search for datasets published on ESRI portals from within the catalog pane TM. It would be great if this existing functionality could be extended to also allow external metadata catalogues as sources. In addition, it would be very helpful if the results of the search could optionally be limited to the active map extent by making use of the extent description in the metadata.
