Starting from the experiences of long lasting managing almost 300 very different geoscientific product types containing more than 10 million data sets and approximately 15 TByte of data volume, processed by different national and international scientific groups using the GFZ Information System and Data Center (ISDC) infrastructure, this presentation is focusing on the current status of the global gravity field information and data management as well as providing a concept and guidelines for realizing an information technology infrastructure consisting of data archives, information systems and related interoperable services in order to manage global distributed geodetic data sources. Most of the content of this presentation is universally valid and can be adopted for diverse geoscience domains too.
Most of the data which are managed by the ISDC are coming from the German CHAMP satellite, from the American-German GRACE satellite as well as from the German public-private partnership satellite TerraSAR-X mission and appropriate projects. The scientific results are covering geodesy, geophysics and atmospheric research. More than 1500 registered users and user groups all over the world have access to the data using the project and product integrating ISDC portal which is providing different graphical user interfaces (GUI) and non-GUI batch processing interfaces. The ISDC geodetic products are low level processed time series from geoscientific instruments onboard of the satellites, ground-based GPS receiver and superconducting gravimeters but also earth rotation parameters or high level processed global gravity field models.
Considering the current situation of existing national and international scientific gravity field information and data management infrastructure and services, the result is reflecting a very inhomogeneous picture. There is a big band with of individual and proprietary solutions spanning still non-discovered (offline) archives on hard discs, CDs or tapes, websites with simple links to the data sets, accessible online using anonymous ftp and also metadata catalog-based information systems providing sophisticated product search features as well as authorized access to data and information. Based on user and system requirements in consideration of various constraints and derived main use cases the necessary steps for the development of global distributed data catalog and data access services on the basis of existing information and data management systems are presented in this talk. Some of the main topics are metadata and appropriate standards, OGC/ISO web-based catalog services, the lifecycle of products as well as ontology and Web 2.0 concepts and the semantic web.