Data

The OpenEarth philosophy related to data aims to collect and disseminate important data sets in a project-superseding manner rather than on a project-by-project basis.
This requires that all datasets are conform to a number of basic quality criteria:

• data is not just numbers and meta-information, but consists of raw data produced by the measuring equipment (e.g. volts) + processing scripts.
• raw data should be stored in the OpenEarthRawData repository enabling version control
• raw data should then be enriched with metadata and processed into useful data products (netCDF) using transformation scripts also put under version control in a repository
• resulting data products should conform to the best open source standards available
• data products should be made available easily via webbased interfaces (OPeNDAP) but also with automated procedures for widely-used data processing languages such as matlab, IDL, python, fortran, C and java (OpenEarth Tools)
• data products are primarily meant for dissemination, raw data and scripts are primarily meant for archiving

To meet the above criteria we embrace international standards like:

• netCDF (self-describing, open source, widely-used file-format standard)
• CF parameter meta-data (vocabulary of quantities)
• Unidata units (vocabulary of units)
• EPSG spatial meta-data codes (vocabulary of coordinates)
• INSPIRE owner meta-data
• Open source Creative Commons philosophy or GNU
• OPeNDAP (as running operationally for MATROOS)
• OpenGIS
  • web map services ([WMS]),
  • web coverage services (WCS), and
  • web feature services (WFS).
• Fabric For loading data on the opendap server you can use fabric.

The data collection procedure and the relation between those standards is explained in the [OpenEarth Data Standards] document, developed in the framework of the EU FP7 Project MICORE.

Numerous other datasets have been or are being uploaded continually in the MICORE and Building with Nature research programmes.

OpenEarth is not the only initiative to share and disseminate government-paid Earth science data freely on the web using open standards. We made an inventory of related initiatives.