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Abstract
Spatial Observation Services and Infrastructure is a project to develop and verify innovative infrastructure and services within the context of land monitoring and Earth Observation initiatives at European and Member State (MS) levels. The project's results contribute to the concept definition of the Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS) emphasising symmetrical online sharing of information as opposed to unidirectional reporting. In a pre-operational set-up, involving the European Environment Agency (EEA), four MS sites and the European Space Agency (ESA), a decentralised information system respecting the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) principles is demonstrated integrating distributed data and processing services as well as interactive multi-lingual access.
The geoland2 project is carried out in the context of Global Monitoring for the Environment and Security (GMES), a joint initiative of the European Commission and ESA, aiming to build up a European capacity for GMES. The Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) task shall set up operational services for the discovery, viewing, access and delivery of all products generated in the geoland2 project.
The paper presents the projects along the five International Standards Organisation (ISO)/Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing viewpoints and concludes with the main recommendation that service provisioning can strongly benefit from a (re-) utilisation of the Service Support Environment (SSE) technology provided sustainably by ESA and from the related rich experience.
Acknowledgements
The SOSI project is conducted under contract of the European Space Agency (ESRIN Contract No. 21776/08/IL-G and ESTEC PECS Arrangements with CZ and HU) and the strong in-kind steering support by the European Environment Agency (EEA). The authors especially wish to thank Mr. S. D'Elia and Mr. P.G. Marchetti from ESA for fostering and supporting this initiative, Mr. A. della Vecchia for the technical cooperation as well as Mr. C. Steenmans, Mrs. A. Sousa, Mr. J. Bliki, Mr. S. Jensen and the LUDC team from EEA for essentially having formed the project idea, and for accompanying its execution. The preparedness by the company Geoville to host the Luxembourg SOSI instantiation is very much appreciated. The contributions of the company Spacebel regarding SOA and SSE know how and of the company MEEO regarding automated LC generation are very valuable to the SOSI project. Special thanks for constructive and promising discussions as well as excellent work go to all project partners namely Siemens Austria, Siemens Hungary, ANF Data and Gisat.
geoland2 has received funding from the European Community's 7th Framework Programme under grant agreement FP7 218795. The authors express their special thanks to the SDI subtask partners Infoterra GmbH, VITO, Spacebel and UAB.