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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.

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]

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]