The COastal and Marine Perception Application for Scientific Scholarship (COMPASS) is a knowledge infrastructure that supports enhanced discovery of scientific resources, including publications, data sets and web services. It provides users with the ability to discover resources on the basis of domain knowledge using ontologies, and scientific knowledge, including the scientific models, theories and methods that were used to conduct the research described by the resource. The application includes an architecture that adopts standards from the geospatial information community to ensure interoperability between repositories and allow interaction with content from digital libraries. The architecture shows how ontologies can be used as a registry for an interoperable infrastructure. A prototype was successfully implemented and evaluated with users, finding enthusiasm and support for the approach, with some suggestions for improvements of the prototype implementation.