Standards-Based Raster Geo Grid Services for Integrated Earth Information Access in EurAsia

Peter Baumann, Shengbo Chen, International University Bremen, Germany


In April 2006 a joint Chinese-European initiative on geo service standardization has been launched. The EarthLook project will advance and implement geo raster service standards, i.e., open, interoperable access to very large archives of multi-dimensional raster data like 1-D environmental measurements, 2-D satellite imagery, 3-D image time series (x/y/t) or exploration data (x/y/z), 4-D climate simulations (x/y/z/t). The standards at hand are the existing Web Coverage Service (WCS) and the proposed Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) with in the Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC), the main geo service standardization body. These standards will be established as an advanced geo raster Grid service layer on top of the EU gLite Grid framework.

To this end, existing European standardization activity will be leveraged and Chinese standards collaboration will be added. Reference implementations and real-life use cases in disaster mitigation and earth system research and education will serve as proof of concept and highly visible references for raising standards awareness and adoption. Implementation will rely on EU-developed and open-source components. The consortium includes key standardization activists, geo/IT/Grid experts, standardization body, public authority, and industry end users.

Key partners in the consortium are Global Change Information and Research Centre / China, Jilin University / China, the National Disaster Reduction Center of China, International University Bremen / Germany, Open GeoSpatial Consortium Europe Ltd., the Italian National Research Council, and Statoil, Norway.

In our talk we will present the EarthLook project goals, the partners' contributions towards achieving it, and the current state.


Keywords: geo raster service standardization