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Persistent URL http://purl.org/net/epubs/work/35118
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Record Id 35118
Title Harmonisation of Grid and Geospatial Services Standards in the Earth and Environmental Sciences
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Abstract Many investigations in the geosciences require consideration of datasets for which the points of truth are distributed. Furthermore, resolution of many geoscientific problems requires use of computational resources that are only available remotely. However, finding and accessing these resources is often unsystematic, and may be very difficult. Even where data centres and computational services exist, they use different interfaces and online access mechanisms, and there is little coordination at cataloguing. Developments in Grid computing and Web Services are providing the means to share computational and informational resources across organisations and boundaries. The approach is to place standard service interfaces in front of the resources. We report on a set of interrelated initiatives in Australia and UK to establish a common framework in the earth and environmental sciences based on Grid and Web Services. A UK project, the 'NERC DataGrid', is developing software that will be used by various data centres to create a 'virtual environmental data Grid'. The first trial will involve the British Atmospheric Data Centre and British Oceanographic Data Centre. For the first time, users will be able to easily find and access both atmospheric and ocean data from these centres in exactly the same way. A community of researchers in Australia (SEEGrid - the Solid Earth and Environment Grid) is concentrating in two areas: (i) open interfaces to data and processing, leveraging Open Geospatial Consortium web service interface standards, and ISO/TC 211 geographic information standards, and (ii) simulations of earth processes using computing resources available over open Grid interfaces. Trials have involved simultaneous access through standard interfaces to heterogeneous measurement archives, and configuration of process simulations independent of computation engine. A particular focus is the importance of standardisation of information content at the semantic level, enabling the development and deployment of interoperable services that may be configured flexibly into service chains. A partnership between these UK and Australian Grid researchers, geoscientists, climate scientists, and standards experts is building a demonstration providing access to a range of geoscience, atmospheric and ocean data across the two continents. The work is in partnership with academic researchers, statutory custodians, industrial clients, system vendors, regulators, policy and decision makers, and is based on an alphabet-soup of web, grid and geospatial standards.
Organisation CCLRC , ESC , ESC-DMG
Keywords Natural environment
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Language English (EN)
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Paper In Conference Proceedings In 2005 Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union, New Orleans, 23-27 May 2005, Eos Trans. AGU, Joint Assembly Supplement, 86(18) (2005). 2005