The Geospatial Interoperability Problem: Lessons Learned from Building the Geolens Prototypye

In 1994 NASA issued a Cooperative Agreement Notice to support new research on digital library technology that would enable broader public use of its Earth science data over the Internet. As a response to this CAN, the Universal Spatial Data Access Consortium (USDAC) was formed and it proposed to prototype the GeoLens system that would not only give broader public access to NASA’s Earth observation data, but also made these data interoperate with other geospatial data served by the Federal government. Part of the challenge of the GeoLens Project has been to decompose the larger geospatial interoperability problem into constituent issues. This chapter will address these issues and describe solutions implemented in our GeoLens prototype. The purpose of this exercise is to support an end-to-end scenario, beginning with geospatial data discovery and ending with conflation of geospatial data extracts from extremely heterogeneous sources. The larger goal is to investigate the opportunity for new information processing standards and innovative digital library technology to play a key role in the realization of this scenario.