KEYWORDS: Data modeling, Satellites, Sensors, Environmental monitoring, Systems modeling, Standards development, Internet, Web services, Information technology, Environmental sensing
The demand for the rapid provision of EO products with well-defined characteristics in terms of temporal, spatial, image-specific and thematic criteria is increasing. Examples are products to support near real-time damage assessment after a natural disaster event, e.g. an earthquake. However, beyond the organizational and economic questions, there are technological and systemic barriers to enable a comfortable search, order, delivery or even combination of EO products. Most portals of space agencies and EO product providers require sophisticated satellite and product knowledge and, even worse, are all different and not interoperable.
This paper gives an overview about the use cases and the architectural solutions that aim at an open and flexible EO mission infrastructure with application-oriented user interfaces and well-defined service interfaces based upon open standards. It presents corresponding international initiatives such as INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community), GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security), GEOSS (Global Earth Observation System of Systems) and HMA (Heterogeneous Missions Accessibility) and their associated infrastructure approaches. The paper presents a corresponding analysis and design methodology and two examples how such
architectures are already successfully used in early warning systems for geo-hazards and toolsets for environmentallyinduced
health risks. Finally, the paper concludes with an outlook how these ideas relate to the vision of the Future Internet.
KEYWORDS: Sensors, Data modeling, Standards development, Satellites, Web services, Information security, Computer programming, Systems modeling, Data acquisition, Data processing
Heterogeneous Earth Observation missions pose the problem that each of them offers its own way and technology of
how to search for and access to mission results such as Earth observation datasets. Typically, these tasks are provided by
ground segment software services which may be called through corresponding interfaces by client geospatial software
applications. This paper presents the design and the architecture of the Heterogeneous Mission Accessibility (HMA)
which is an interoperability initiative of the European/Canadian Ground Segment Coordination Body. The final objective
of HMA is to leverage the idea of a service-oriented architectural style. This means, that the individual ground segment
systems shall be loosely-coupled by means of an HMA Service Network.
The paper is an excerpt of the comprehensive "HMA cookbook" to be published soon by the European Space Agency
(ESA). It describes the HMA approach for user authentication and authorization based upon standard Web services and
the discovery of, the access to and the presentation of datasets by means of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
standards. It is outlined how the feasibility analysis of sensor observation tasks and the ordering of products may be
expressed by the service and information models of the OGC Sensor Web Enablement initiative. The paper concludes
with a discussion about the follow-on research topic of service-oriented design of Earth observation applications.
Conference Committee Involvement (1)
ISCRAM 2013 - International Conference on Informations Systems for Crisis Response and Management
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