MDweb  is an open source generic tool designed for such distributed collaborative work. It provides a web service to catalog, and help others locate resources, documents, and services for geographic or non-spatial information. MDweb is based on international geographic-information standards for metadata and communications.

MDweb focuses on the spatial and semantic aspects in resource description, and searches by using thematic and spatial reference bases specific to the target application. MDweb also includes extensive features to automate data entry and manage referential bases such as providing editing templates, building spatial databases and accessing thesauruses.

MDweb is based on JEE technologies, and implements the OGC CSW 2.0.2 specification using the ISO 19115 application schema.

This CSW implementation in the most recent MDweb version draws on the Java language metadata implementation of the Geotoolkit library to support multi-lingual searches while a transactional mode enables the harvesting of remote ISO 19115 Dublin Core, EbRIM compliant catalogs.