Abstract
We introduce the rationale for, and architecture of, the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Open Data Portal ( http://cci.esa.int/data/ ). The Open Data Portal hosts a set of richly diverse datasets – 13 “Essential Climate Variables” – from the CCI programme in a consistent and harmonised form and to provides a single point of access for the (>100 TB) data for broad dissemination to an international user community. These data have been produced by a range of different institutions and vary across both scientific and spatio-temporal characteristics. This heterogeneity of the data together with the range of services to be supported presented significant technical challenges. An iterative development methodology was key to tackling these challenges: the system developed exploits a workflow which takes data that conforms to the CCI data specification, ingests it into a managed archive and uses both manual and automatically generated metadata to support data discovery, browse, and delivery services. It utilises both Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data nodes and the Open Geospatial Consortium Catalogue Service for the Web (OGC-CSW) interface, serving data into both the ESGF and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). A key part of the system is a new vocabulary server, populated with CCI specific terms and relationships which integrates OGC-CSW and ESGF search services together, developed as part of a dialogue between domain scientists and linked data specialists. These services have enabled the development of a unified user interface for graphical search and visualisation – the CCI Open Data Portal Web Presence.
Highlights
The European Space Agency (ESA) Open Data Portal has been developed to meet the objective of disseminating data outputs from the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme (Hollmann et al, 2013)
The CCI programme was initiated as a contribution towards the goal of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to create a database of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) and to more fully exploit the long-term global archives of earth observation data available from ESA and its member states
Standard FTP access to CCI data was directly available via the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) services, all that was necessary for the CCI was to ensure that FTP endpoints for the datasets were entered into the ISO19115 dataset records served from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)-CSW
Summary
The European Space Agency (ESA) Open Data Portal (http://cci.esa.int/data/) has been developed to meet the objective of disseminating data outputs from the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme (Hollmann et al, 2013). The main contribution of the work described in this paper is to provide a detailed description of how the portal software was architected to meet the dual challenges of heterogeneous data management at scale and delivering a prescribed set of services for discovery and open access. The former requires curating and hosting a complex and varied set of climate data products in a harmonised and consistent manner.
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