GENESI-DR (Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Repositories)

D4Science shares GENESIS-DR’s objectives aiming to provide guaranteed, reliable, easy, effective, and operational access to a variety of Earth Science data sources, for further integration with other types of information (e.g. documentation, other digital objects) needed by the Earth Science and other communities to build dynamic Virtual Research Environments. In this sense, the collaboration between the two projects shall exploit the power of Web Services in general and Web Services Processing (WSP) features of interest for both Grid and Earth Science communities. Note that standards for WSP are being discussed by the OGF (Open Grid Forum) and OGC (Open Geospatial Committee).

Technology

The GENESI-DR infrastructure refers to the open European-wide federation of distributed Earth Science facilities, interconnecting in particular GENESI-DR participating sites and the participating Earth Science Digital Repositories, facilitating transparent access to data and associated GENESI-DR services.

Among available capabilities and ongoing developments that constitute the initial reference infrastructure of GENESI-DR there is the ESA EO Grid on Demand infrastructure1 which integrates high-speed connectivity, distributed processing resources and large volumes of data to provide science and industrial partners with improved access to end products.

D4Science is continuing a close collaboration with the ESA team responsible for the EO Grid infrastructure as initiated with DILIGENT: current activities involve the direct submission of jobs to the ESA Grid infrastructure and the integration of results within the D4Science repository, thus fully exploiting the Grid paradigm behind both projects. D4Science is following a precise roadmap to exploit the foreseen GENESI-DR infrastructure once it becomes available through user services.

Service

The GENESI-DR services are provided to the community to better exploit Earth Science data covering functionalities such as: discovery, access to data, on-demand processing, storage of user results. A major objective of GENESI-DR is to integrate new scientific and technological derived paradigms in operational infrastructures in response to latest Earth Science requirements: one of the preliminary measures to fulfil this objective is to adapt the ESA Grid on-Demand for multiple digital repositories by supporting at least one application based on Grid-on-Demand access to multiple sites.

Through services for the monitoring of land vegetation and ocean chlorophyll, D4Science currently advertises a direct interaction with the ESA EO Grid on Demand Portal which offers access to science-oriented Earth Observation Grid services and applications including access to a number of global geophysical ENVISAT products.

Once ESA EO Grid on Demand Portal user services are adapted to work on multiple digital repositories D4Science can provide the means for a dynamic integration of those repositories providing the communities with a broader view on data access and exploitation; on the other hand D4Science can offer a reliable operational environment for the storage, processing and manipulation of results delivered by those services.

Networking

On various occasions, detailed discussion for effective collaboration between the two projects was performed in meetings such as:

• GRL2020 workshop, March 2008
• 5th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting organized by BELIEF II, June 2008
• EGEE User Forum (presentation to a session organized by D4SCIENCE was delivered by GENESI-DR), September 2008