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The Global Mercury Observation System (GMOS) Project includes a specific Work Package aimed at developing tools (i.e. databases, catalogs, services) to collect GMOS datasets, harvest mercury databases, and offer services like search, view, and download spatial datasets from the GMOS portal (www.gmos.eu). The system will be developed under the framework of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) Directive and the Directive 2003/4/EC on public access to environmental information, which both aim to make relevant, harmonized, high-quality geographic information available to support the formulation, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of policies and activities that have a direct or indirect impact on the environment. Three databases have been proposed (on emissions, field data and model results), and each will be equipped with state-of-the-art, open-source software to allow for the highest performance possible. Web-based user-interfaces and prototype applications will be developed to demonstrate the potential of blending different datasets from different servers for environmental assessment studies. Several services (i.e. catalog browsers, WMS and WCS services, web GIS services) will be developed to facilitate data integration, data re-use, and data exchange within and beyond the GMOS project. Different types of measurement and model datasets provided by project partners and other sources will be integrated into PostgreSQL-PostGIS, harmonized by creating INSPIRE-compliant metadata and made available to a larger community of stakeholders, policy makers, scientists, and NGOs (as well as to other public and private institutions, as dictated by the Directive 2003/4/EC). Since interoperability is a central concept for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), the Global Monitoring for Environmental and Security (GMES) and the INSPIRE Directive, guidelines developed in these three frameworks will be adopted. The use of standards will be a key concern throughout the encoding process. We will use the international standards for data and spatial schemas (ISO19107, ISO14825), for metadata (ISO19115:2003, ISO/DTS19139:2005, ISO15836) and for services (WMS 1.1.1, WFS 1.0, SLD 1.0, GML 3.1). On the other side, we will use XML for data exchange, together with SOAP, XSD, J2EE (for applications development) and W3C (for standard interfaces). With specific reference to GMES, the global database on mercury monitoring and the GMOS model outputs will be made available through a series of monitoring, forecast and re-analysis services. Finally, we hope the GMOS operational services will contribute to the Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate (MACC) project, by providing access to atmospheric environmental services.

The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) is implemented by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) with the goal to ensure that decision in nine Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs) of Earth observations (EOs) can be informed by sustained Earth observations. Extracting actionable information from Earth observations often depends on research, and utilization of the societal benefits of EOs requires the involvement of science and research communities. Building a GEOSS responding to the needs of a wide range of users necessitates contributions from many science and technology (S&T) communities. The success of GEOSS depends on a outreach of GEO to the relevant S&T communities, and the outreach concept has a focus on demonstrated services for S&T communities. The GEO Work Plan includes several Tasks focusing on outreach to S&T communities, and most of the GEO Community of Practice have a strong S&T component. Infrastructure serving and linking S&T users communities and GEOSS has been developed and is integrated into a GEOSS S&T Service Suite. The GEOSS S&T Stakeholder Network facilitates input from S&T communities to GEO.

An important incentive for scientists and researchers is the recognition and renown given to them in citations of their work. While citation rules are well developed for the use of papers published by others, very little rules are available for the citation of data made available by others. Increasingly, citation of the source of data is also requested in the context of socially relevant topics, such as climate change and its potential impacts. Providing means for data citation would be a strong incentive for data sharing. Georeferenced data are crucial for addressing many of the burning societal problems and to support related interdisciplinary research. The lack of a widely accepted method for giving credit to those who make their data freely available and for tracking the use of data throughout their life-cycle hampers data sharing. Furthermore, only clear and transparent data citation allows other scientists to obtain the identical data to replicate findings or for further research.

In the last decade a significant number of projects and programmes in different domains of Earth Observation and environmental monitoring have generated a substantial amount of data and knowledge on different aspects related to environmental quality and sustainability. Big data generated by in-situ or satellite platforms are being collected and archived with a plethora of systems and instruments making difficult the sharing of data and transfer of knowledge to stakeholders and policy makers to support key economic and societal sectors. The overarching goal of ERAPLANET is to strengthen the European Research Area in the domain of Earth Observation in coherence with the European participation in the Group on Earth Observation (GEO) and Copernicus. The expected impact is to strengthen European leadership within the forthcoming GEO 2015-2025 Work Plan. ERA-PLANET is designed to reinforce the interface with user communities, whose needs the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) intends to address. It will provide more accurate, comprehensive and authoritative information to policy and decision-makers in key societal benefit areas, such as Smart Cities and Resilient Societies; Resource efficiency and Environmental management; Global changes and Environmental treaties; Polar areas and Natural resources. ERA-PLANET will provide advanced decision-support tools and technologies aimed to better monitor our global environment and share the information and knowledge available in the different domains of Earth Observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world driven by the Internet and the readily accessible information it provides, there exists a high demand to easily discover and collect vast amounts of data available over several scientific domains and numerous data types. To add to the complexity, data is not only available through a plethora of data sources within disparate systems but also represents differing scales of space and time. One clear divide that exists in the world of information science and technology is the disjoint relationship between hydrologic and atmospheric science information. These worlds have long been split between observed time series at discrete geographical features in hydrologic science and modeled or remotely sensed coverages or grids over continuous space and time domains in atmospheric science. As more information becomes widely available through the Web, data are being served and published as Web services using standardized implementations and encodings. This paper illustrates a framework that utilizes Sensor Observation Services, Web Feature Services, Web Coverage Services, Catalog Services for the Web and GI-cat Services to index and discover data offered through different classes of information. This services infrastructure supports multiple servers of time series and gridded information, which can be searched through multiple portals, using a common set of time, space and concept query filters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SeaDataNet is an EU funded project aiming to create and operate a pan-European, marine data infrastructure for managing the large and diverse datasets (i.e. temperature, salinity current, sea level, chemical, physical and biological properties) collected by the oceanographic fleets and the new automatic observation systems. In order to make the SeaDataNet system compliant with the INSPIRE Implementing Rules for discovery service, an ISO 19139 encoding of the SeaDataNet Common Data Index (CDI) metadata model was defined. Moreover, the problem of heterogeneous data sources has been addressed. In fact, a widely used system of SeaDataNet partners and oceanographic-marine community is THREDDS/OPeNDAP; this raises up the problem of federating into SeaDataNet framework THREDDS/OPeNDAP systems as well. In this paper we describe an interoperability framework to access resources (i.e. data and services) that are available through CDI and THREDDS/OPeNDAP services. The proposed solution implements a common catalog interface to discover and access the two heterogeneous resources in a common way. This catalog service is fully distributed and implements international standards as far as geospatial information discovery and query are concerned. The developed solution is called GI-cat and was experimented in the framework of the SeaDataNet European project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the recent years, Representational State Transfer (REST) has been proposed as the architectural style for the World Wide Web. REST promises of scalability and simple deployment of Web Services seem to be particularly appealing for Earth and Space Science (ESS) applications. In fact, most of the available solutions for geospatial data sharing, applying standard interoperability specifications, require complex service-oriented infrastructures; these are powerful and extensible environments, but they usually result in difficult to deploy and manage for ESS research teams. Thus, ESS researchers would gain great benefit from an easy way of sharing geo-information using the international interoperability standards. The variety and complexity of geo-information sharing services poses several architectural issues; in fact these services encompass sensor planning and observation, coverages and features publication and retrieving, models and simulations running, data citation and annotation. Consequently, the adoption of a specific architectural style must be carefully evaluated against these specific requirements. In this work we analyse the existing geospatial services from an architectural perspective and investigate their possible RESTful implementation. Particular attention is paid to the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS). Possible benefits and drawbacks, along with open issues and possible solutions are discussed. Our investigation suggests that REST may fit well to the typical ESS research usage cases. However, the architectural choice (e.g. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) vs REST) will depend on a case-by-case analysis. Other important factors must be considered, such as the application context: a valuable example in point are the e-Business and e-Government application scenarios which require message based solutions - like those implemented by SOAP. In any case, there is a clear need for harmonization and reconciliation of these two approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Digital Earth, an important priority is to integrate data from multiple sources. Interoperability and metadata are key instruments to reach such an objective. Interoperability is achieved by adopting and applying international standards for service interfaces and data models. As far as geospatial information is concerned, interoperability recognizes three important, interrelated data concepts: feature, coverage, and map. The present work deals with Web services for coverage access. Coverage perspectives characterizing three geospatial communities - i.e. the Earth Science (ES), GIS and Digital Earth communities, are discussed. ES community requirements for coverage access services are presented and discussed making use of two methods concurrently: Critical Success Factor (CSF) analysis method supplemented through the use of Usage Cases. A CSF hierarchy and derived critical requirements and problems are introduced. An implementation approach consisting of four general principles is proposed. Access service categories emerging from the analysis are presented and their comparison with the present access services for the ES is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We address the problem of data and information interoperability in the Earth System Science information domain. We believe that well-established architectures and standard technologies are now available to implement data interoperability. In particular, we elaborate on the mediated approach, and present several technological aspects of our implementation of a Mediator-based Information System for Earth System Science Data. We highlight some limitations of current standard-based solutions and introduce possible future improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As far as interoperability is concerned, in a service-oriented framework, it is possible to distinguish different service tiers; each tier contains systems and tools which implement that tier's specific task. The present paper analyses such a framework for the Earth Sciences and the GIS information communities. For the Earth Sciences community, the heterogeneity of existing protocols and data models is outlined, considering the experience of the Unidata community. For the GIS community, the interoperability opportunities laid by the OGC's specifications are briefly introduced. The need of achieving the two communities' frameworks interoperability, and its importance for science Digital Library applications are introduced. A solution is presented and discussed; it is based on the following technologies: THREDDS Data Server, OGC WCS/WFS and ncMLGML. An OGC interoperability experiment, which tests the proposed solution, is briefly presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last decade, operational monitoring and forecasting systems have been developed in all the European seas. The exchange of data and products and the development of services for a wide community of users pose some fundamental issues, whose solution has become a priority in integrated and GMES referring projects, such as the MERSEA European project. These projects aim to develop a European system for operational monitoring and forecasting on global and regional scales of ocean physics, bio-chemistry and ecosystems. GMES system and its operational projects need to federate resources and expertise coming from diverse organizations working on different Earth Sciences fields (e.g. satellite data processing, in situ observing systems, data management, ocean and ecosystem modeling, etc.). Therefore, it is required a Marine Information Management (MIM) system capable of facilitating the regular real-time exchange of high quality information, data and products. Moreover, MIM system must provide appropriate information for a wide range of external users both in real-time and delayed mode. In this paper an architecture based on the OPeNDAP/ THREDDS technology is proposed as a solution for these operational systems. In this context, a catalog merging solution is introduced for the MIM system, which results in the design and development of the THREDDS Dataset Merger (TDM): a set of services meant to merge THREDDS Dataset Inventory Catalogs, so to achieve a unique catalog service for a whole database federation. TDM service merges distributed and autonomous THREDDS catalogs in order to work out a virtual merged catalog. The TDM service was extended in order to provide automatic catalogs synchronization. This service allows extending the pull-based TDM paradigm to support push-based applications. Some security issues are also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A preface for the September 2005 issue of the "Advances in Geosciences," is presented.