The Earth and space sciences are rapidly implementing international open standards for discovery, access, and processing of geospatial information. These standards provide for interoperability well tuned to the Earth and space sciences, because the standards were developed by members of the same community and are now being refined as best practices.
This IJDE issue discusses some of the latest advances in implementing open standards for access to sensor data, processing of the data suitable for a specific decision or research context, and presentation of the information to the various communities ranging from researchers, policy makers, and general public. These interoperability solutions are extremely important to build advanced Digital Earth infrastructures and support multi-disciplinary systems and applications.
The present IJDE issue covers most of the presentations invited to a special session held at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in 2009. This event was jointly organized by the EGU Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) division and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
Discussion by the session participants resulted in additional feedback to the standards bodies (e.g. OGC, ISO, etc.) to further advance the standards applicability to geosciences and contribute to the Digital Earth vision.