Crossing the digital divide: an interoperable solution for sharing time series and coverages in Earth sciences

In a world driven by the Internet and the readily accessible information it provides, there exists a high demand to easily discover and collect vast amounts of data available over several scientific domains and numerous data types. To add to the complexity, data is not only available through a plethora of data sources within disparate systems but also represents differing scales of space and time. One clear divide that exists in the world of information science and technology is the disjoint relationship between hydrologic and atmospheric science information. These worlds have long been split between observed time series at discrete geographical features in hydrologic science and modeled or remotely sensed coverages or grids over continuous space and time domains in atmospheric science. As more information becomes widely available through the Web, data are being served and published as Web services using standardized implementations and encodings. This paper illustrates a framework that utilizes Sensor Observation Services, Web Feature Services, Web Coverage Services, Catalog Services for the Web and GI-cat Services to index and discover data offered through different classes of information. This services infrastructure supports multiple servers of time series and gridded information, which can be searched through multiple portals, using a common set of time, space and concept query filters.