ESA Leads Endeavour
To Save Earth Science Data
(10 March 2008) The amount of
information being generated about our planet is increasing at an exponential
rate, but it must be easily accessible in order to apply it to the global needs
relating to the state of the Earth.
GENESI-DR (Ground European
Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Repositories), an ESA-led,
European Commission (EC)-funded two-year project, is taking the lead in
providing reliable, easy, long-term access to Earth Science data via the
Internet.
"We shall soon be receiving petabytes of data about our planet
from space, so data access will be a major logistical problem. The EC has
funded GENESI-DR as a flagship project in Europe to help meet this challenge,"
said Prof. Alan O'Neill, Director of the National Centre for Earth Observation
at the University of Reading.
GENESI-DR will allow scientists from
different Earth Science disciplines located across Europe to locate, access,
combine and integrate historical and fresh Earth-related data from space,
airborne and in-situ sensors archived in large distributed
repositories.
Currently, information about the state of the Earth,
relevant services, analysis results, applications and tools are accessible in a
very scattered and uncoordinated way, often through individual initiatives from
Earth Observation mission operators, scientific institutes dealing with ground
measurements, service companies, data catalogues, etc.
A dedicated
infrastructure providing transparent access to all this will support Earth
Science communities by allowing them to easily and quickly derive objective
information and share knowledge based on all environmentally sensitive
domains.
The use of high-speed networks (GÉANT) and the
experimentation of new technologies, like BitTorrent, will also contribute to
better services for the Earth Science communities.
In order to reach its
objectives, the GENESI-DR e-Infrastructure will be validated against user needs
for accessing and sharing Earth Science data. Initially, four specific
applications in the land, atmosphere and marine domains have been selected,
including:
Other applications will complement this
during the second half of the project.
"Data assimilation makes use of
the diverse observational data now available to us and synthesises them into a
coherent picture of the evolving state of the planet - a digital rendition of
the real world," said O'Neill, who is working on GlobModel and
GENESI-DR.
"No institution has all the skills in one place, but must be
drawn from university and operational institutions distributed across many
countries. With this objective in mind for Europe, ESA funded the GlobModel
project and GENESI-DR could represent the way to ensure easy access to all
necessary data and resources."
GENESI-DR also aims to develop common
approaches to preserve the historical archives and the ability to access the
derived user information as both software and hardware transformations
occur.
Ensuring access to Earth Science data for future generations is
of utmost importance because it allows for the continuity of knowledge
generation improvement. For instance, scientists accessing today's climate
change data in 50 years will be able to better understand and detect trends in
global warming and apply this knowledge to ongoing natural
phenomena.
GENESI-DR will work towards harmonising operations and
applying approved standards, policies and interfaces at key Earth Science data
repositories. To help with this undertaking, GENESI-DR will establish links
with the relevant organisations and programmes such as space agencies,
institutional environmental programmes, international Earth Science programmes
and standardisation bodies.
From an industry point of view, Stefano
Beco, the Innovation and Advanced Applications Group Manager for Elsag Datamat,
one of the Directors of the project, said the project's infrastructure, which
is based on state-of-the-art technologies such as Grid, will pave the way for
them introducing new services in the Earth Science domain from a scientific and
commercial viewpoint.
"We believe that GENESI-DR will push towards an
easily accessible 'virtual repository', where an extremely large set of
valuable scientific information will be available to small and medium
enterprises and large companies, providing benefits to different actors, from
data providers to service providers to end users," Beco said.
(source:
ESA)
|
||||||||||||
