Interoperability federated system for the scientific community working in the EOS sector

A federation system solution suited for the challenging area of the Earth Observation from the Space (EOS) domain is presented. It addresses system integration issue, conceiving a distributed system based on modern industry-standard protocols, whose components are existing legacy systems. A web-enabled Federation System - a distributed system which implements a loosely-coupled federated database system- was designed and developed. The interoperability issue was tackled by a couple of solutions: a mediated message-based architecture and the specification of a federation common model. Several e-business enabling technologies were utilised for achieving the system reusable components, in particular XML-based ones. An application scenario, experimented in the framework of a project funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) is briefly reported.