The OpenEarth philosophy related to data involves that important data sets, rather than working on a project-by-project basis, should be collected and be made available in a project superceding manner:

• important datasets should be stored and made available easily via webbased interfaces
• data transformation scripts should be subjected to version control
• data products should include all necessary metadata

To achieve this international standards are embraced like:

• NetCDF
• CF parameter meta-data
• EPSG
• Spatial meta-data codes
• INSPIRE owner meta-data
• OPeNDAP (as running operationally for Rijkswaterstaat MATROOS), and
• OpenGIS
  • web map services (WMS),
  • web coverage services (WCS), and
  • web feature services (WFS).

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.