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:

• imporant datasets should be stored and made available easily via webbased interfaces
• 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 figure below and in the Micore Data Standards document.