GEO

The GRID has been recognized as one of the top ten breakthroughs of the century. The Globus Toolkit (GT) (http://www.globus.org) provides the most powerful and widely supported implementation of a set of components that can be used independently or in a combined fashion to develop GRID programming tools and applications.

Both the GRID and the Web communities have been driven by powerful international organizations – Global Grid Forum (GGF) and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) respectively – and actively supported by most of the existing software vendors. These communities started far apart in application and technologies and since then have trying to converge. The first major step of this convergence has been OGSI. However, despite enthusiasm for OGSI, adoption within Web community turned out to be problematic. This led to the recent joint efforts for the definition of WSRF, which essentially means that Grid and Web communities can move forward on a common base.

This proposal aims to provide Grid technology support for the earth observation by closely following the above GRID and Web convergence. The primary goal is to extend the existing earth observation frameworks, utilizing the power of the Grid architecture in order to enable large-scale integration and flexible and controlled sharing of computational and information resources across different organizations and geographical locations.

Furthermore, Grid Service becomes a Web Service refined to focus on the features required by Grid infrastructures and applications, and thus conforming to a set of conventions that provide for the controlled, fault resilient and secure management of stateful services addressed by the recent and forthcoming GT specifications.

In earth observation, basic workflows can be created to chain Web Services together, allowing for a simple composite Web Service model, which can be enriched with more functionality, such as include complex execution flows, custom data shipment and compression, intermittent communication and disconnected operation, distributed and interactive monitoring.

Consortium

Informatics & Telematics Institute (GR)
Institute for Space Applications and Remote Sensing, National Observatory of Athens (GR)