Grid-enabled Standard-compliant Open Computing Environment for Earth Science Exploration and Applications

The seamless access to large quantities of distributed, heterogeneous geospatial data/ information is still a critical issues to Earth science exploration and applications now. Using Grid computing and geospatial standards technologies, we devise an open, reusable, optimized, secured and service-oriented computing environment for semi-automatically archiving, sharing and serving geospatial data/information in the way that user required. The environment uses a Grid service- oriented architecture based on the Globus toolkits. The most important of them are the data/information retrieval mediator (DIRM) and data/information serving mediator (DISM). DIRM is based on our refined geospatial metadata for describing geospatial data/information and services and Globus replica manger service for managing replicas of massive data. DISM consists of Grid-enabled geospatial standard services for providing on-the-fly user-customable data. This environment offers an open, secure, ubiquitous and standard-compliant geospatial computing platform to provide Earth science communities with access to massive geospatial data for high-performance, data- and computing-intensive scientific research and applications.