The ESA-FAO GEOportal – Operational Gateway to GEOSS
By Mirko Albani , posted on March 11th, 2008 in Articles, GEOSS/ICEO News, In This Issue
Mirko Albani, Hermann Ludwig Moeller, Jolyon Martin, European Space Agency (ESA)
The GEOportal is one of the three candidates developed in response to a set of requirements from the GEO Secretariat aiming at the implementation of a GEO Web Portal serving the GEO User Community.
As part of the Initial Operational Capability of GEOSS, the GEOportal constitutes a main access point to worldwide information on Earth Observation capabilities and services including the ones proposed and implemented in the framework of GEO activities. The GEOportal includes a number of common functions and solutions to search and discover services and provides news and other relevant information to the GEOSS user community. The Community concept is extended to a global community and across all GEOSS users providing an entry point to the resources no matter where the user is located and no matter the nature of usage within the GEOSS areas of application. The portal achieves this goal based on two key characteristics:
- A high-level structure of the information according to the nine GEO Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs).
- A global coverage, linking all resources contributed by the GEO members and participating organizations.
GEOportal complements the already existing Community Portals and other Portals operated by GEO Members and Participating Organizations and as such, unlike most other GEOSS components, it does not belong to any single member or organization.
Based on the GEO recommended standards and following the Geospatial Portal Reference Architecture of the Open Geospatial Consortium,the GEOportal provides a variety of services:
- Geospatial Portal Service providing the user interfaces for viewing, discovering data, information and services available in GEOSS.
- Portrayal Viewer Service allowing the display and handling of maps and context information from various sources, e.g. from different GEO Societal Benefit Areas through WMS services.
- Interfaces to Catalogue Services of the GEOSS Clearinghouse, allowing distributed catalogue search in an interoperable manner.
- Browse through a comprehensive directory of service providers e.g. related to GEO Members and Participating Organizations.
- Retrieval of Earth observation education, training and capacity building resources.
 |
| GEOportal homepage |
Through a user friendly interface the homepage allows quick access to a variety of information resources. When a relevant event happens somewhere in the world, an SBA alert appears on the globe, localized over the region related to the event. For example real time alerts and activations of the International Charter “Space and Major Disasters” are already appearing on the rotating globe on the GEOportal homepage.
From the homepage, to access to different types of information, the GEOportal allows navigation and access primary via Societal Benefit Area selection and Geographical selection. The SBA selection leads the user to a main SBA page providing relevant information on the services available within that SBA, the service providers, the international initiatives in place, as well as showcases of data sets. From there, the user can have access to specific service pages, providing, among other, a user friendly description of the services, a point of contact and a direct link to the services. A system of related resources builds a knowledge system able to provide the user with a wider variety of information on services and organizations operating in its area of interest. The user can also refine his search by SBA subcategory and/or geographical area, in order to retrieve services more appropriate to satisfy his informational needs. The geographical selection allows the user, selecting regions and countries from the rotating globe, to access a variety of data, information resources and services available for that specific geographical area. The search can be refined as well by the SBA of interest.
At the time of writing, several GEO Member States and Participating Organizations have established implementation pilots and made available Community Portals accessible from the GEOportal. These community portals are serving particular regions and/or are specific to a Societal Benefit Area of GEOSS and related user scenarios.
In perspective, the GEOportal may also be used for creating Community Portals or individual portals if required by a GEO member or participating organization. The GEOportal software is based on a number of Open Source modules which could be made available and configured to create for example a Portal for a specific SBA. The GEOportal open source software may be taken up by GEOSS communities to create their own portals, lowering the entry barrier, in particular for developing countries, to become part of the GEOSS and contributing to the establishment of an interoperable GEOSS.
With the number of components of GEOSS growing, it is fundamental to ensure that any resource newly available to GEOSS can be discovered through the GEOportal coupled to the GEOSS Clearinghouse and GEOSS Registries. ESA has secured the operations of the portal until the end of 2009 as a minimum and accordingly to ESA standard service levels.
The GEOportal operations are not actually limited to the operations of the technical infrastructure of the underlying GEOportal system, but include the maintenance of the information contained locally within the GEOportal and ensure the consistency of the links and interfaces to GEOSS. Local information may include up to date sample data sets representative of the different SBAs and the GEOportal provides also value-adding in that its operators proactively identify and highlight specific data and information.
The need for additional features/evolutions will be assessed during the Initial Operational Capability of GEOSS taking into account the operational experience of the GEOportal and users’ feedback. The GEOportal is now open to serve GEOSS the global community.
The GEOportal is actually operational and is available at the URL: www.geoportal.org.
Editor’s note: FAO is the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
2 Prior Responses to “The ESA-FAO GEOportal – Operational Gateway to GEOSS”
NASA Daily Image
Remnant of a Supernova
Vital clues about the devastating ends to the lives of massive stars can be found by studying the aftermath of their explosions. In its more than twelve years of science operations, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has studied many of these supernova remnants sprinkled across the galaxy. The latest example of this important investigation is Chandra's new image of the supernova remnant known as G350.1-0.3. This stellar debris field is located some 14,700 light years from the Earth toward the center of the Milky Way. Evidence from Chandra and from ESA's XMM-Newton telescope suggest that a compact object within G350.1+0.3 may be the dense core of the star that exploded. The position of this likely neutron star, seen by the arrow pointing to "neutron star" in the inset image, is well away from the center of the X-ray emission. If the supernova explosion occurred near the center of the X-ray emission then the neutron star must have received a powerful kick in the supernova explosion. Data suggest this supernova remnant, as it appears in the image, is 600 and 1,200 years old. If the estimated location of the explosion is correct, this means the neutron star has been moving at a speed of at least 3 million miles per hour since the explosion. Another intriguing aspect of G350.1-0.3 is its unusual shape. Many supernova remnants are nearly circular, but G350.1-0.3 is strikingly asymmetrical as seen in the Chandra data in this image (gold). Infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (light blue) also trace the morphology found by Chandra. Astronomers think that this bizarre shape is due to stellar debris field expanding into a nearby cloud of cold molecular gas. The age of 600-1,200 years puts the explosion that created G350.1-0.3 in the same time frame as other famous supernovas that formed the Crab and SN 1006 supernova remnants. However, it is unlikely that anyone on Earth would have seen the explosion because of the obscuring gas and dust that lies along our line of sight to the remnant. These results appeared in the April 10, 2011 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. Image Credits: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO/I. Lovchinsky et al; IR: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Cool. Where are the links to GEOPortal?
Also the Capchta on the comment form needs a label to say what it is / to do.
how do the other two portal candidates compare? I’d like to be able to review all three at the same time….