CDI/THREDDS Interoperability in the SeaDataNet Framework

In this paper we describe an interoperability framework to access resources (i.e. data and services) that are available through CDI and THREDDS service. The proposed solution implements a common catalog interface to discover and access the two heterogeneous resources. This catalog service is fully distributed and implements international standards as far as geospatial information discovery and query are concerned. The developed solution is called GI-cat. This solution was experimented in the framework of the SeaDataNet European project. This paper consists of three main sections. In the first section the SeaDataNet framework is briefly introduced as well as the standard discovery and access interfaces used for geospatial information interoperability. In the second section, GI-cat is presented and discussed, detailing especially the mediation aspects -that is, the solution adopted to achieve data models harmonization and access protocol adaptation. Finally, in the third section of this work we describe the successful experimentations done and the application client we developed for demonstrating GI-cat.