An Holistic View of Coverage Model and Services for SISE-SEIS

There has recently been a growing recognition of the need for interoperability - not only in traditionally 'geographic' disciplines (e.g. mapping, physical geography) but also in more science-focussed disciplines like Earth systems science, geology, meteorology, oceanography. These latter application domains bring a fresh viewpoint to the nature of spatial information. While the conventional geographic disciplines have a primary focus on a 'feature' view (points/lines/polygons with thematic attributes), the scientific domains utilise a conventional 'coverage' view (thematic properties distributed over some region in space and/or time). For integrated information systems like SEIS and SISE, however, a more harmonised model is required. Fundamentally, the feature- and coverageviews are complementary, and any general framework must support both viewpoints. A framework for harmonisation is offered through the observation process that lies at the heart of much Earth science data. By recognising that an observation process samples the natural environment (which may be represented through a feature view) and generates a coverage result, we are able to reconcile these hitherto different approaches. This harmonized model supports the different types of discovery and access services useful to serve the heterogeneous SEIS use cases.