Powered by standards — new data tools for the climate sciences

摘要

The ultimate goal of much current research in earth science informatics is toenable more efficient discovery and use of environmental data. Large-scale effortsare underway at regional and global levels. For instance the European INSPIREDirective (2007/2/EC) and international GEOSS initiative will both provideunprecedented catalogues of earth observation and environmental data, withlinks to online services providing direct access to digital data repositories. Whilethe motivation for these emerging infrastructures is clear (e.g. understandingglobal change), it is less obvious how they might be implemented. Standards willplay a major role and considerable effort is currently being devoted to theirdevelopment by bodies like the International Organisation for Standardisationand the Open Geospatial Consortium. Internet search engines are amongst themost popular websites visited today. Ming the metaphor of a web search portal,we review the potential of new geospatial standards to provide an advanced, user-friendly approach to discovery and use of climate-science data.