Principal Investigator (PI): Christopher Lynnes, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

This project will address the interoperability of two data system infrastructures that are widely used by different segments of the Earth science research and applications community. The first segment uses systems and components developed within the Earth science community around a family of geoscience protocols, including Open-source Project Data Access Protocol (OPeNDAP) and the Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services (THREDDS) data catalog, to access Earth science data. The second segment uses systems based on the interface specifications from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to access geospatial data collections. The goal of this project is a gateway to allow a user of a client based on one of the infrastructures to have direct access to the collections of a data provider employing a server based on the other.

This technology development project merges activities of two separate ROSES Advancing Collaborative Connections for Earth System Science (ACCESS) projects. The first serves the needs of the Coordinated Enhanced Observing Period (CEOP), an international water cycle research program that is using a specific set of satellite, in situ and model data to better document and simulate water and energy fluxes and reservoirs and to document the seasonal march of the monsoon systems and assess their driving mechanisms. In order to realize those objectives, CEOP will need to use a wide mix of datasets from many different sources ranging from field observations to computer simulation.

Many members of the CEOP science community rely on OPeNDAP clients but have a requirement to access data provided from OGC servers, in particular EOS satellite data sets. This project will develop a "CEOP Satellite Data Server" to be a gateway for OPeNDAP clients to access the satellite data.

The second component addresses requirements that have been expressed by the geospatial/land science/applied Earth science communities, who typically use geographic information system tools for data analysis and display. This community has become accustomed to clients based on OGC protocols for interoperable access to maps, feature data (e.g., point, line, polygon), and coverage data (e.g., satellite images, digital elevation models) and Catalog Services for Web that provide catalog service for clients to find data and services. However, they also need to access data served by geoscience protocols such as OPeNDAP. This project plans to develop a "Geoscience Gateway" that would enable OGC clients to find and access science data sets served by geoscience protocols.

The components developed by the combined project will demonstrate that ultimately a constellation of seamlessly integrated yet distributed, heterogeneous, and independently functional data and information systems across a wide spectrum of the Earth system research and application communities can be established.