*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
!Data Standards Workflow_small2.PNG|align=centre,width=300pxpx!
To meet the above criteria we embrace international standards like:
* [netCDF] (self-describing, open source, widely-used file-format standard)
* [CF parameter meta-data|CF] (vocabulary of quantities)
* [Unidata units|CF] (vocabulary of units)
* [EPSG|http://www.epsg.org/] [spatial meta-data codes|http://www.epsg-registry.org/] (vocabulary of coordinates)
* [INSPIRE owner meta-data|http://www.inspire-geoportal.eu]
* Open source [Creative Commons philosophy|http://creativecommons.org/] or [GNU|http://www.gnu.org/licenses/]
* [OPeNDAP|http://opendap.org/] (as running operationally for [MATROOS|http://matroos.deltares.nl/])
* [OpenGIS|http://www.opengeospatial.org/]
** web map services ([WMS]),
** web coverage services ([WCS|http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wcs]), and
** web feature services ([WFS|http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/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|Data Collection Protocol] document, developed in the framework of the EU FP7 Project MICORE.
!OpenEarthBuildingBlocks.png|align=right,width=300pxpx!
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|Data sharing initiatives].
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