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Saturday, January 23, 2010

Earth Observation Application Profile for OGC Catalogue Services

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced adoption andavailability of the "OGC EarthObservation (EO) Application Profile for the OGC Catalogue Services -- (CSW) Specification" Version 2.0.2. The EO-CSW standard will benefit a wide range of stakeholders involved in the provision and use of datagenerated by satellite-borne and aerial radar, optical and atmosphericsensors.

The EO-CSW standard describes a set of interfaces, bindings andencodings that can be implemented in catalog servers that dataproviders will use to publish collections of descriptive information(metadata) about Earth Observation data and services. Developers canalso implement this standard as part of Web clients that enable datausers and their applications to very efficiently search and exploitthese collections of Earth Observation data and services.

This specification is part of a set that describe services for managingEarth Observation (EO) data products. The services include collectionlevel, and product level catalogues, online-ordering for existing andfuture products, on-line access etc. These services are put intocontext in an overall document 'Best Practices for EO Products'. Theservices proposed are intended to support the identification (EO) dataproducts from previously identified data collections. In other words,the search and present of metadata from catalogues of EO data products.

The intent of the profile is to describe a cost effective interfacethat can be supported by many data providers (satellite operators,data distributors...), most of whom have existing (and relatively complex)facilities for the management of these data. The strategy is to reuseas far as possible the SOAP binding defined in the ISO ApplicationProfile, except the schemas defining the information model. To achievea cost effective interface, some choices will be limited by textualcomments. EO data product collections are usually structured to describedata products derived from a single sensor onboard a satellite or seriesof satellites. Products from different classes of sensors usually requirespecific product metadata. The following classes of products have beenidentified so far: radar, optical, atmospheric. The proposed approachis to identify a common set of elements grouped in a common (HMA)schema and extend this common schema to add the sensors specific metadata. More Info

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