What I'm reading today...

The Core Services system (aka mediator) receives, rewrites, optimizes and distributes queries to multiple resources and integrates query results into a single file that is unified semantically, structurally and syntactically for both spatial and non-spatial aspects. Ontologies are used to capture and publicize the semantics and schematics of local sources and global standards, as well as their mappings. Potential resources include; OGC spatial data services, Z39.50 metadata services, integrated assessment modeling tools, and various remote data stores.

Scary thing is that it makes sense :-)