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This document describes the activity which was done by the GEOSS Common Infrastructure (GCI) Research WG of the "GEOSS Architecture Implementation Pilot" (Phase 5).

GEOSS envisions a future wherein decisions and actions for the benefit of humankind are informed by coordinated, comprehensive and sustained Earth observations and information. Ultimately, this requires the ability to integrate information across scientific domains to address issues at regional and global levels. EuroGEOSS, an EC-sponsored FP7 project, has built an initial operating capability (IOC) in the three strategic areas of drought, forestry and biodiversity to facilitate and demonstrate multi-disciplinary applications. EuroGEOSS has implemented a brokering service that allows finding and accessing data from a wide range of standards and domainspecific practices including the use of a semantically rich querying capability. The paper presents the functionalities achieved by EuroGEOSS. The paper also presents the impact of advanced services through an assessment of societal benefits of the extended information availability.

Earth scientists are engaged in integrating knowledge stemming from different disciplines concerned with the constituent parts of the complex Earth system. The goal is to understand Earth's properties as a whole and thereby deliver benefits to society. The scope and complexity of Earth system investigations demand the formation of distributed, multidisciplinary collaborative teams, which presents both scientific and technological challenges. The information systems used by the different disciplines are characterized by heterogeneous and distributed data and metadata models, different semantics and expertise, diverse protocols and interfaces, and different data policies and security levels. We describe how the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) infrastructure facilitates the formation of these distributed, multidisciplinary and collaborative teams. Initiated in 2005 by the GEO Architecture and Data Committee, the GEOSS Interoperability Process Pilot Project (IP3) is a medium for reaching interoperability between disparate components contributed to GEOSS from multi-disciplinary Earth and Space Science communities. In 2007 one of IP3's key successes was an end-to-end demonstration that combined biological species data, accessed through the GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility) contribution to GEOSS, and climate model output data, part of the WMO's Information System's contribution to GEOSS, accessed through NCAR, and seamlessly fed the data stream into an ecological niche model (ENM). The ENM runs in an open modeling framework to produce a new product displaying the impacts of climate change on the geographic distribution of selected