A Publish-and-Subscribe System for Publicizing Earth Science Information and Services
Date
2010-10-29
Authors
Peng, Chunming
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Abstract
Dozens of terabytes of Earth observation data and their derived science products are generated each day. For the tremendous and precious Earth science data and information to be fully explored and utilized, it is required that advanced technologies be developed and deployed for data providers to easily publish and deliver their products and data consumers to easily find and obtain needed data, preferably in customized forms. The purpose of this thesis research is to develop a service- and data-casting architecture for publication and subscription of Earth science data, information, and services. The architecture will not only enable generation of feeds for any updates and changes occurring to Earth Science data and Web Services from a particular provider but also allow aggregation of feeds from other data and service providers, thus significantly enhancing the visibility of available data and services and easing the searching and access of data. A prototypical system based on the architecture has been developed and deployed to publish the data and services provided by GeoBrain, a distributed interoperable webbased geospatial information system. The terms "serviceCasting" and "dataCasting" were coined because of their similarities with the "Podcasting" concept; they all describe the delivery of metadata over the Internet by information feeds based on Really Simple Syndication (RSS) or ATOM standard. GeoBrain data and services are published via ATOM feeds to the cloud and to be syndicated in the to-be-created geographic feed reader. In order to satisfy the special needs of geographers, two namespaces and additional elements are added to enhance geographic features descriptions. The prototypical system demonstrates that syndication and aggregation of feeds can decentralize the repository of earth science data and make information more discoverable and accessible.
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Keywords
Atom, Rss, Pub-and-sub, Publicize, Earth science