Study on advanced geomatics services to support GMES applications in Spatial Data Infrastructures

An essential aspect of a SDI, and a prominent interoperability issue, pertains to discovery services: in fact, several components of a SDI architecture are designed to implement resource discovery. Actually, some kind of geospatial resource discovery is implied by any user scenario. For this reasons, I have narrowed the focus of my research to discovery services and to the components that implement them, termed catalogues. This is my major scientific and technical contribution to the research in the field. I have designed and experimented a new, improved model and technology for the discovery of geospatial resources: an advanced catalogue service featuring query distribution, resource mediation and asynchronous messaging. This research is directed at improving the existing specifications rather than at creating new ones, with an emphasis on the qualitative aspect of interoperability, more than on quantitative aspects that can be measured and plotted. A concrete result of this research is the submission of a change proposal to the appropriate standard developing organization, where modifications to existing open standard specifications are found to be necessary.