People interested in contributing to this event via a demonstration and/or poster can contact the organizing committee: Luana.Bisaccia @ esa.int

The workshop follows last year’s 2nd successful event covering Grid and eCollaboration technologies and standards, highly relevant for today’s rapidly evolving eScience infrastructures dedicated to Earth Science. The technology focus of this year’s workshop is on data repositories, but also presenting updates on recent developments, reviewing the status of the art and analysing emerging community requirements.

An important objective is bringing together academic institutes and industry for developing a community view of challenges, working solutions, and sustainability through the fostering of new Earth Observation business opportunities (e.g. GMES value added services). As such, the workshop responds in particular to the plans established by the Earth Science community in the context of several EC funded projects, such as DEGREE, BEINGRID, DILIGENT, CASPAR and the ready to start GENESI-DR, and D4SCIENCE.
Bringing together large Earth Science data repositories and high-performance scientific data processing applications, the workshop is an opportunity to enable and support new collaborations between research projects and operational services providers.

Among the contributions expected from IT and Earth Science are those representing:

• Grid middleware, applications and uptake projects, such as: GEODE, EGEE, CoreGrid, DEISA, GRIA, EUMEDGRID, OGSA-DAI, A-WARE, gLite, gCube;
• Emerging Standards initiatives: OGF, ETSI, CEOS WGISS, OGC, OpenDap, THREDDS, CCSDS, OAIS;
• Organisations defining e-infrastructure future plans and roadmaps: ESFRI, E-IRG, Enterprise Grid Alliance, NESSI;
• Operators and developers of GMES and ESA EO data access infrastructure such as: HMA, MMFI, DIMS, SeaDataNet, EUFAR, HISEEN, RESPOND.

The workshop is organised in the following sessions:

• Session 1 (Wednesday 16 Jan Morning): Preparing for large Earth Science Data Infrastructures (invited presentations).
• Session 2 (Wednesday 16 Jan Afternoon): Ongoing industrial and science experiences towards large Earth Science e-infrastructures, presenting achievements and plans from specific GRID projects dealing with Earth Science applications (oral presentations and posters).
• Session 3 (Thursday 17 Jan Morning): Bridging GRID and Earth Sciences emerging standards and interoperability, discussing achievements and plans to encourage e-infrastructure common standards for science communities (oral presentations and posters).
• Session 4 (Thursday 17 Jan Afternoon): e-infrastructure as new collaborative initiatives for Earth Science, highlighting the compatibility of collaborative platforms developments with e-infrastructures (oral presentations and round table).