Once the system is fully functional, the NorDataNet hub will harvest disovery metadata from each contributing data centre and make these searchable in a unified catalogue. Data will be served from the host data centre and will not be harvested. However, bundling of data from different data centres is a functionality that will be supported as well as combination of data that are available through OPeNDAP from the host data centre.
The basic search supports search by keywords (GCMD Science Keywords), spatial and temporal extent as well as a freetext search in all available discovery metadata. The search interface will be extended with more support for faceted search and ranking. NorDataNet is following the Research Data Alliance activities in this area.