An e-Infrastructure for Geosciences

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Global-scale problems, like environmental conservation, resource exploration and natural disaster prevention could be helped by the Global Earth Observation (GEO) Grid project. The project will provide access to the many different types of data needed to understand global-scale phenomena and is currently looking to provide federated data access using OGSA-DAI.

Solving problems at the global scale requires access to data from a large range of sources, such as satellite imagery, geological data and ground-sensed data. Each of these data sets is subject to different usage terms and licensing policies making it difficult to access the data. The GEO Grid project will overcome these issues by integrating the data, whilst enforcing ownership policies, and making it available through a set of services. Researchers can then access the services and combine the data to advance their understanding of the Earth more accurately.

To enforce the owner’s publication policies, the GEO Grid system uses a Virtual Organisation (VO) - a dynamic collection of individuals, institutions, and resources that can be shared. This framework allows resource providers to clearly define what is shared, who is allowed to share what, and the conditions under which sharing occurs. Different services and users can form their own GEO Grid VO and define which services and resources they are allowed to access according to their interests, whether this be disaster mitigation, weather prediction, or natural resource exploration. To add database federation to their software, GEO Grid is working with OMII-UK to provide the required database functionality using OGSA-DAI. This will require VOMS (VO Membership service) authorisation provided in the OMII-Europe-released version of OGSA-DAI GL, which will be adopted in GEO Grid.

Isao Kojima, Serviceware Research Group, AIST

www.geogrid.org