IN31E-01:
Supporting Community Needs for Data through CWIC

Wednesday, 17 December 2014: 8:00 AM
Yonsook Enloe, Columbus Technologies and Services Greenbelt, Greenbelt, MD, United States, Andrew E Mitchell, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, Kenneth R McDonald, Science and Technology Corporation, Silver Spring, MD, United States and Martin Yapur, National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, Silver Spring, MD, United States
Abstract:
The Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) agencies, established in 1984 to coordinate civil space-borne observations of the Earth, through its Working Group on Information Systems and Services (WGISS), have initiated a community access project, the CEOS WIGSS Integrated Catalog (CWIC), to connect the CEOS agency data systems to the Group of Earth Observations (GEO) System of Systems.

Current CWIC data partners offering access or developing access to their Earth Observation data include NASA, NOAA, USGS, National Institute for Space Research (Brazil), Canadian Center for Mapping and Earth Observations (CCMEO), the Academy for Opto-Electronics (China), the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), and EUMETSAT. Additional data partners are considering offering their data through CWIC.

There are vast quantities of data accessible via CWIC. Offering access to only the data and services of interest to each science and application community through the development of a tailored community client helps lead the users directly to data access and the direct use of the data more quickly. The community clients can offer other services associated with using the data – such as tools for subsetting, reprojection, data integration, etc. The development of these specialized clients gets the communities more directly engaged with the data providers and their feedback can lead to improvements in the access services that are offered.

In October 2013, the GEO Director noted that CWIC offered access to about 2/3 of the satellite data accessible via GEO. Why has CWIC succeeded? The broader CWIC team makes decisions as a group (e.g. which standards that CWIC should support). The CWIC support team builds the translations from the CWIC supported standards to the data partner systems into CWIC. The data partner does not have to make any changes to the native data system. The CWIC support team provides very strong technical support for and the constant engagement of the partners. These are big factors in CWIC’s success. In late 2012, US government agencies, NASA, NOAA, and USGS, agreed to provide long term funding commitment for the CWIC project, ensuring that partners can count on the CWIC services for many years.

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