The new EU-funded project D4Science-II ('Data infrastructure ecosystem for science') has held its kick-off meeting from 13 to 16 October in Pisa, Italy. It is set to establish 'virtual research environments' that will offer significantly enhanced services to scientists without high development and maintenance costs. [...]

Terradue was awarded a contract with the European Space Agency to evaluate and develop a Cloud Interface on the Earth Observation Grid. In the frame of the EO G-POD (EO Grid Processing on-Demand) project for Terradue will provide an operational interface to storage and computing resources available on the Amazon Cloud. [...]

The Wilkins Ice Shelf is at risk of partly breaking away from the Antarctic Peninsula as the ice bridge that connects it to Charcot and Latady Islands looks set to collapse. The beginning of what appears to be the demise of the ice bridge began this week when new rifts forming along its centre axis resulted in a large block of ice breaking away. [...]

The workshop follows last years’ successful events covering Grid and e-Collaboration technologies and standards, highly relevant for today’s rapidly evolving e-Science infrastructures dedicated to Earth Science and Space applications. The technology focus in this year’s workshop is on digital repositories, but also on presenting updates on recent e-Infrastructure developments, reviewing the state of the art. [...]

The INSPIRE Implementing Rules for Discovery Services were published in draft form on November 4th 2008. This draft was sent to the European Commission for final revision after one round of consultation with registered interested parties (SDICs/LMOs). This report assumes that the contents of Draft 3.0 will not materially differ from the final legislated version and talks of the impact of the changes performed [...]

The Rai Tre's Okkupati show dedicated its 3rd August emission to the ITECHSPAZIO program. Presenting this program from the BIC Lazio (Bussiness Innovation Centre of Lazio Region) and the European Space Agency (ESA), the broadcast shows the integrated pre-incubation and incubation actions that enable the transformation of advance research ideas and concepts into successful business ventures. Terradue was the first company selected and shown as a successful example of the ITECHSPAZIO program. [...]

Previously we looked at how, in the abstract, an OpenSearch-based approach could meet the INSPIRE requirements for discovery services. In this article Jo offers some reflections on how we got to our prototype implementation of an OpenSearch interface to a geospatial metadata repository. [...]

Terradue has released the very first public version of duetopia as open source and hosted in google code pages. This version presents the initial implementation of the libraries to provide import and export from common standard formats into a shared model (ISO 19115, ISO 19139, FGDC, RDF/XML) [...]

During the 3rd through 5th of June, 2008, the BEinGRID project will be hosting its Industry Days in Barcelona, Spain, in a shared venue at the Barceló Hotel Sants with the 23rd Open Grid Forum Conference (OGF23). The event will highlight the best of BEinGRID, the European Union’s largest integrated project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) research through the sixth research Framework Programme (FP6), including selected demos of the current 18 Business Experiments, as well as key guest speakers from the software and services industry. [...]

The amount of information being generated about our planet is increasing at an exponential rate, but it must be easily accessible in order to apply it to the global needs relating to the state of the Earth. GENESI-DR (Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Repositories), an ESA-led, European Commission (EC)-funded two-year project, is taking the lead in providing reliable, easy, long-term access to Earth Science data via the Internet. [...]

In this installment we're walking through implementing a simple spatial data search service using the OpenSearch protocol. For those of us based in Europe and working with publicly-funded data, a key to "future-proofing" spatial data search is to make sure an interface complies with the INSPIRE Implementing Rules on Discovery Services. [...]

In creating multilingual metadata registries, there are a lot of fun issues to run across. Wherever data is being ''shared'', translation may need to be considered. Common standards provide us with means to "internationalise" textual properties that help us identify and locate pieces of non-textual data (obvious textual properties of spatial data sets are title, abstract, layer names, sets of keywords). [...]

The workshop follows last year's 2nd successful event covering Grid and eCollaboration technologies and standards, highly relevant for today's rapidly evolving eScience infrastructures dedicated to Earth Science. The technology focus of this year's workshop is on data repositories, but also presenting updates on recent developments, reviewing the status of the art and analysing emerging community requirements. [...]

A big deal for internet-oriented GIS systems on offer in Europe is the impact of the INSPIRE Directive establishing a Spatial Data Infrastructure in Europe. As it stands, it's a lot of metadata model to complete at once. Without some assistance from systems when trying to audit a lot of data and gather a lot of metadata for publication at once, [...]

Jo's initial thoughts in the context of the "big picture" of SDI ("Spatial Data Infrastructures") research related to metadata. In fact, she was looking for a minimal abstract model, encapsulating that which one can't run a public geodata repository without. Coordinate reference system and extents for data sets, contact details, provenance and license information. In the end, she also read a pile of standards documents. [...]

A Spatial Data Infrastructure is, more than anything, a network. Agencies participate in the network, sharing resources with the aim of maximising collective return on investment. The data that we collect is made sense of by others' context. An SDI exists to make it easier to find data, to make copies of it, to understand it. This essay is like a 10,000 foot view of where duetopia fits in a future network infrastructure and data sharing system. [...]

The EC-GIS workshop is an annual workshop series held by the European Commission to bring together large-scale public providers of geodata across Europe. This was a special conference, held in Porto and being the first since the INSPIRE Directive establishing a Spatial Data Infrastructure in Europe became part of European law. [...]

The European Space Agency is offering all European scientists the possibility to perform bulk processing and/or validation of their own algorithms exploiting the large ESA earth-observation archive together with ESA available GRID computing and dynamic storage resources. Terradue Srl. is under contract with the Agency to support this activity taking charge of the definition of the implementation plans and integration activities. [...]

This presents duetopia as a vision of spatial data distribution infrastructure and a set of components available as a service and on an open source basis. [...]

ESA's Earth Observation Data User Element (DUE) has opened the on-line access to the first GlobCover products on April 20th 2007 using a peer-to-peer infrastructure developed by Terradue Srl. The infrastructure ensures an automatic method allowing users to download the different pieces of the requested files simultaneously from multiple computers in collaborative environment. [...]

This is an quick exploration of metadata models for common web-based ways of distributing geospatial data. Looking from the 'minimal abstract model' perspective, it raises some questions about the utility and appropriacy of ISO 19115, and its use in the draft North American Profile for geospatial metadata that is set to replace the current FGDC Core standard. [...]

BEinGRID, Business Experiments in GRID, is the European Union’s largest integrated project funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) research, part of the EU. Terradue is involved in Business Experiment 7 dedicated to Earth Observation where gridify is also used. The objective of this experiment is 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. [...]

The European Space Agency project Grid on-Demand won the 1st Research and Innovation Award ( I Premio Ricerca – Innovazione ) promoted by the Lazio Business Innovation Center (BIC). This award promotes technological and knowledge transfer and the creation of new companies. The European Space Agency (ESA) Grid Processing on-Demand infrastructure (G-POD) initiated in 2003 was the base from which Terradue created the The gridify Application Integration Environment as an incubated spin-off. Through the incubation process started in 2006 Terradue pushed the development of gridify into a generic product enlarging its use beyond the Earth observation applications and services. [...]

The European Space Agency (ESA) has created a special layer of content in Google Earth, enabling people to see over 130 new ESA satellite. The new images can be accessed easily clicking on the 'Featured Content' check-box in the Google Earth sidebar and further clicking on the ESA icon. [...]