ESPAS — Near-earth space data infrastructure for e-science

The aim of ESPAS platform is to integrate heterogeneous data from the earth's thermosphere, ionosphere, plasmasphere and magnetosphere. ESPAS supports the systematic exploration of multipoint measurements from the near-Earth space through homogenised access to multi-instrument data. It provides access to more than 40 datasets: Cluster, EISCAT, GIRO, DIAS, SWACI, CHAMP, SuperDARN, FPI, magnetometers INGV, SGO, DTU, IMAGE, TGO, IMAGE/RPI, ACE, SOHO, PROBA2, NOAA/POES, etc. The concept of extensibility to new data sets is an important element in the ESPAS architecture. Within the first year of the project, the main components of the system have been developed, namely, the data model, the XML schemas for metadata exchange format, the ontology, the wrapper installed at the data nodes so that the main platform harvest the metadata, the main platform built on the D-NET framework and the GUI with its designed workflows. The first working prototype supports the search for datasets among a selected number of databases (i.e., EDAM, DIAS, Cluster, SWACI data). The next immediate step would be the implementation of search for characteristics within the datasets. For the second release we are planning to deploy tools for conjunctions between ground-space and space-space and for coincidences. For the final phase of the project the ESPAS infrastructure will be extensively tested through the application of several use cases, designed to serve the needs of the wide interdisciplinary users and producers communities, such as the ionospheric, thermospheric, magnetospheric, space weather and space climate communities, the geophysics community, the space communications engineering, HF users, satellite operators, navigation and surveillance systems, and space agencies. The final ESPAS platform is expected to be delivered in 2015.