GENESI-DR: Paving the Way for Access to all Earth Science Data

Petabytes of data about our planet exist, but are distributed at different locations; services for analysis of this data, as well as analysis results, applications and tools are also available, but only in a scattered and uncoordinated way. For earth scientists, this presents a major logistical problem that must ben addressed.
The GENESI-DR project (Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations-Digital Repositories) is focused on this data challenge, aiming to facilitate improved collaboration and discovery for earth scientists across the globe. GENESI-DR aims to provide scientists with reliable, easy and long-term access to more—if not all—earth science data and tools via the Internet, facilitating access to and use of historical and new Earth-related data from space, airborne and in-situ sensors.

Basic functionalities

To address this challenge, GENESI-DR requires the following basic functionalities:
Ability for users to transparently access data from different European earth science Digital Repositories (DR) using a homogenous interface;
Ability for users to quickly and easily access large volumes of coherently maintained distributed data;
Ability for DR owners to easily make available their data to a significantly increased audience with no need for duplication to a different storage system.
The first requirement is reflected in the GENESI-DR Central Discovery Service, which allows users and applications to query information about data collections and products existing in heterogeneous catalogues at federated DR sites. This service will be accessible via a web interface—the GENESI-DR Web Portal—or by external applications via open standardized interfaces exposed by the system.
To meet the second requirement, flexibility and performance are taken into consideration by making use of different data transfer technologies, including HTTPS, GridFTP and BitTorrent. And to cope with the third requirement, the GENESI-DR Architecture enables DR owners to produce a metadata catalogue by simply harvesting metadata from their storage systems.

Targeted user communities

The GENESI-DR e-Infrastructure will be validated against specific applications in the land, atmosphere and marine domain:
• Near real-time alignment of aerial images taken to monitor agricultural crops or map urban areas in support of emergency response;
• GlobModel (www.globmodel.info), a tool for real-time data assimilation, addressing major environmental and health issues in Europe, with a particular focus on air quality;
• SeaDataNet (www.seadatanet.org/), a tool aiding near real-time environmental assessments and forecasting of the physical state of oceans.
These applications, and their associated DRs, were selected based on analysis of required data types as well as technical and policy-based attributes.

Future steps and conclusions

Moving forward, GENESI-DR aims to increase the number of integrated DRs and validation applications, as well as to integrate new features required for applications and by DR owners. It will also work with other EU projects to validate the system.
GENESI-DR aims to soon provide initial services to expert users, enabling them to input data to a webbased processing service, or to use grid resources to run a user application for specified data sets. GENESI-DR is also analysing common approaches to the preservation of historical archives and the effect that changes in software and hardware will have on this. It is also investigating the potential for grid-based e-infrastructures to pave the way for new scientific and commercial services in the earth science domain. The GENESI-DR project is funded by the European Commission through the Seventh Framework Programme. GENESI-DR brings together 13 partners. Full information is available at http://www.genesi-dr.eu