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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.

Interoperability has become a key concept amongst scientific communities, in particular with the focus of heterogeneous data discovery and access as well as services discovery. Our work is developed in the context of the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS) Interoperability Process Pilot Project and it demonstrates the feasibility of interoperability between different communities. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) provides through its web portal and services a huge amount of primary species occurrence data, acquired and uni- fied from different data providers. GBIF uses standards relevant to the biodiversity community (e.g. Darwin Core, Taxon Concept Schema), as well as newly introduced concepts and interfaces. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW) is a service that can perform discovery of geospatial data and services, returning results in the form of profiled metadata. In particular the ISO Application Profile (AP) defines a particular set of metadata well known in the geospatial community (ISO 19115/ISO 19119). We make GBIF biodiversity data and services available through a CSW ISO AP catalog; this is done by means of a mapping of the GBIF data model and GBIF services to their CSW ISO AP equivalents. Regarding the data model mapping, the main work was to design the mapping be

In this paper the concept of the Siberian Earth System Science Cluster (SIB-ESS-C) being established at the University of Jena (Germany) is presented. SIB-ESS-C is a spatial data infrastructure for remote sensing product generation, data dissemination and scientific data analysis. The prime objective is to enable researchers to extract information on the state of the Siberian environment and the changes that are occurring using Web-based tools. The region under study covers the entire Asian part of the Russian Federation from the Ural to the Pacific Ocean including the Ob-, Lenaand Yenissey river catchments. Taking into account the large extent of this region the focus is on remote sensing data as the primary data source. A key aspect is to create and analyze long-term time series of various environmental parameters derived from Earth Observation data. The SIB-ESS-C infrastructure is to provide the technical means by which remote sensing time series can be created, distributed and analyzed through Web-based tools. The development of the SIB-ESS-C system follows a service oriented architecture (SOA) approach. Interoperable Web services are being implemented based on standards published by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The main components of the system comprise a Catalogue Service (CSW) publishing metadata on available data products and services, Feature and Coverage Services (WFS, WCS) providing direct access to existing datasets and Web Processing Services (WPS) for spatio-temporal analysis and visualization.

The CYCLOPS project is an FP6 Specific Support Action which aims to bring together two important Communities: GMES and Grid, focusing on the operative sector of European Civil Protection (CP). Recently RISICO, an operative Italian Civil Protection application for wild fires risk assessment, has been ported to gLite by the CYCLOPS working group. RISICO presently runs in Grid accessing data stored using various proprietary formats in a gLite Storage Element. GLite is the Grid middleware developed by the EGEE European project (Enabling Grids for E-sciencE). As a further step we discuss which benefits could be granted to RISICO, realising an intermediate layer of geospatial web-services between the CP application and gLite. All the web-services implement standard interfaces specified by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). In this case the georeferenced data will be stored in standard formats (GRIB/NetCDF) and will be accessed through standard interfaces. The workflow will be as follows: o The CP user selects an area in which the model should be run, selects the input data URIs and indicates an appropriate priority for the action. o Our application, exposing the Web Processing Server (WPS) interface, receives the request, evaluates the input size and the priority, and then activates various independent data access services. These, implementing the Web Coverage

The atmospheric and geospatial communities are still separate worlds with their own tools and data formats. It is extremely difficult to easily share data among scientists representing these communities without performing some cumbersome conversions. ADAGUC aims to reduce the need for scientists to invent their own converter tools. Selected space borne atmospheric datasets will be made accessible to a GIS system in order to be submitted to data comparison, resampling, selection, manipulation and visualization. The user community will be intensively involved in the project to obtain a high fitness for use. The first ADAGUC workshop (Oct 2006) was attended by a large group of users from both the atmospheric and GIS community and resulted in a better understanding of user needs that are currently translated into specifications for the user requirements document of ADAGUC. The deliverables of this project are: Open Source conversion tools, selected atmospheric datasets in a GIS-friendly format and a web service to demonstrate the usability of the above to the geospatial and atmospheric community.