Metadata is placed centrally in Spatial Data Infrastructure initiatives because it provides the groundwork from which to share data between applications. With the European Parliament Directive establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) taking shape, there is a need in every public authority and publicly funded entity in Europe comply with the Implementation Rules in an easy, practical and straightforward fashion. Terradue supports the development of DCLite4G namespace and of the open source duetopia software as a lightweight metadata management and search system. Together they provide a set of services for indexing, searching, sharing and storing very large spatial data sets and constitute the core of what is needed to develop a "Spatial Data Infrastructure"

The validation of earth remote sensing satellite data, and associated algorithms, often requires a large amount of processing resources and highly interactive access to the large amount of satellite data. On the other-hand, the cost of the necessary computing infrastructure coupled with the access to large volumes of satellite data is often too high to motivate local investments. As such, providing a common shared infrastructure accessible to science users is a very valuable and cost effective approach to support EO science and application development. The Grid model developed by Terradue has proven to overcome known problems that haunt Earth observations services with the paradigm change in the data and application flows. This paradigm change reduces the strain on the network, optimizes the use processing resources, reduces substantially or eliminates completely data access time delays and shipping issues and provides a framework for IPR enforcement and management.

BEinGRID, Business Experiments in GRID, was the European Union’s largest integrated project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) research, part of the EU. Terradue was involved in Business Experiment 7 dedicated to Earth Observation where gridify is also used. The objective of this experiment was the implementation of an example of a class of services which require large and near real time data access and complex processing. The products are global Earth coverage products that respond to emerging science and institutional environmental needs. The gridify creates a application environment where near real time operation can be controlled, monitored and accessed.

MRI is an imaging technique used primarily in medical settings to produce high quality images of the inside of the human body. New developments in this field require the complex and computing intensive processing of nuclear magnetic resonance imaging to either extract more information or enable better visualization of information. Depending on the exact MRI processing technique and complexity of the algorithm used their processing time can go from minutes to days. For some cases, combination of parameters have to be tested to obtain the best results. Terradue is supporting MRI imagery processing research by joining the computer power and storage capacity of the GRID world with its algorithm development.

The current engagement with open source community networks allows Terradue to work with the current open standards base from a viewpoint of technological pragmatism and real world business use cases. This fact encourages an ethos of adaptability in technology base and business practice, keeping software and service release cycles both rapid and stable. Working closely with open source projects also allows the rapid adoption of interesting features and standards, reinvesting knowledge and resources for the benefit of other SME projects. In this sense Terradue is a 'mutual enterprise' that maximizes the collective return on investment.

Terradue offers a specialist service for the management and distribution of very large spatial data sets using a peer-to-peer infrastructure. The infrastructure uses the BitTorrent peer-to-peer technology and ensures an automatic method that allows users to download the different pieces of the requested files simultaneously from multiple computers in a collaborative environment. This infrastructure is being used by the ESA’s Earth Observation Data User Element (DUE) to give access to the GlobCover products. This images are one of the most detailed global composites ever made of the Earth's land surface and were produced by the ESA-initiated GlobCover project lead by MEDIAS FRANCE with the participation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), the European Environmental Agency (EEA), the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the Global Observations of Forest Cover and Global Observations of Land Dynamics (GOFC-GOLD) Implementation Team Project Office.