Data Access and Interoperability
Besides their long-term preservation, sustainable access to historical and up-to-date earth observation data through common interfaces is of primary importance for ensuring the use of these data for various applications.
Through the interactive web catalog system EOWEB®, users are able to identify collections, search for data products of interest by specifying location, time and other criteria, retrieve detailed product information, browse images, and order products. Behind its web gateway, EOWEB® also provides a set of standard web services, extended by geodata access services for primary data, both following the web mapping service specifications of the Open Geospatial Consortium.
In cooperation with ESA, DLR participates in the establishment of earth observation data and service interoperability in the framework of the Heterogeneous Mission Accessibility (HMA) project. In order to ensure the connectivity of GMES-contributing missions operated by DLR (currently TerraSAR-X and IRS), user services and payload ground segment core functions have been extended to support all applicable GMES Space Component Data Access scenarios, such as
- Regional monitoring via repeated acquisitions over the same area,
- Land use analysis via full coverage of large geographic areas,
- Rapid mapping after disasters via emergency rush satellite tasking and rush retrieval of pre-disaster reference products,
- Near-real-time weather and atmosphere monitoring via near-real-time data acquisition, processing and dissemination.
