The Infrastructure for Geospatial Information Interoperability in the SeaDataNet Project

This paper describes an interoperability solution for geospatial resources (i.e. data, services, models and applications) sharing developed in the context of the FP6 European Project SeaDataNet. It has been designed taking into account the project mission: to develop a Pan-European infrastructure for the oceanographic and marine data and products management, indexing and access. Presently, in the framework of oceanography and marine resources, several international standards can be implemented in order to access the available resources (e.g. ISO TC211 standards, OGC specifications and INSPIRE Directive implementing rules). At the same time, there exists a number of well accepted community standards such as: THREDDS, OPeNDAP, netCDF-CF. The proposed solution is based on the "System of Systems" approach, adopting solutions to make the mentioned specifications interoperable. The resulting infrastructure implements mediation and brokering functionalities in order to provide, both scientists and decision makers, with a consistent and practical way for the discovery, evaluation, and download of heterogeneous resources needed by SeaDataNet applications. Basing on the conclusions of this work, the paper presents some recommendations for marine-oceanographic information sharing systems.