Case study: using Web services for the management of environmental data

CCLRC is involved in the development of grid and data management tools for a number of e-Science projects in the UK including the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) funded "Environment from the Molecular Level". CCLRC's Web services based multidisciplinary data portal, uses an XML metadata model of scientific data to explore and access the content of data resources within CCLRC"s main laboratories in the UK and other facilities in Europe. Last year CCLRC adapted the data portal for the project so that earth scientists could store and access their own metadata and datasets, and simultaneously access related metadata and datasets from other facilities around the world. To achieve this the data portal was redeveloped using Web Service technology so that the internal services could be accessed via any user interface or system specific to the e-science project community. Previously, access was provided only via a standard Web browser.