Persistent WCS and CSW services of GOES data for GEOSS

The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) is a new international effort to provide an integrated system on top of the distributed, diverse legacy systems to create an open, public infrastructure for worldwide Earth observation research and applications. One key approach for enabling GEOSS is that legacy systems must support GEOSS-endorsed public standards. This paper presents a case study consisting of providing a persistent data customization service through the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) protocol and a data discovery service through the OGC Catalog Service-Web Profile (CSW) protocol for NOAA GOES data. These two services talk to the legacy NOAA data systems on the back end, and provide open standards-compliant interfaces on the front end. These two service prototypes make NOAA GOES data queryable and accessible in GEOSS to serve different societal benefit areas (SBA). The lessons learned may be useful to others in upgrading legacy data systems to support open standards.