Advanced Cascading Sensor Observation Service

Main goals of “Global Monitoring for Environment and Security” (GMES, see http://www.gmes.info/), and “Global Earth Observation System of Systems” (GEOSS, see http://www.earthobservations.org) can be summarized as: “how to remove the obstacles for sharing environmental information?”. Austrian Research Centres (ARC) participates in development of the IT-infrastructure, architecture and services capable of addressing this challenge in the context of risk management through ORCHESTRA IP (http://www.eu-orchestra.org/), and in the context of environmental monitoring networks through SANY IP (http://sany-ip.eu/). In order to minimize the cost associated with “bridging the technology gaps” between the networks, ORCHESTRA proposes an abstract architecture and a methodology for mapping this abstract architecture onto the technical platform of choice. At the level of information exchange, ORCHESTRA demands self-description of all services and data offered in a network. In particular: “all meta-information MUST be provided at least in a form suitable for interpretation by humans”; “syntactic meta-information MUST also be provided in a form suitable for interpretation by machines”; and “providing semantic meta-information in a form suitable for interpretation by machines (e.g. by means of an ontology) is highly encouraged” [Schimak (Ed.), 2007].