Integrated CEOS European Data Server

ESYS plc and the Department of Geomatic Engineering at University College
London (UCL) have been funded by the British National Space Centre (BNSC) to
develop a web GIS service to serve geographic data derived from remote sensing
datasets. Funding was provided as part of the BNSC International Co-operation
Programme 2 (ICP-2).

Particular aims of the project were to:

1. use Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC, recently renamed from the OpenGIS
Consortium) technologies for map and data serving;

2. serve datasets for Europe and Africa, particularly Landsat TM and Shuttle
Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) digital elevation model (DEM) data;

3. provide a website giving access to the served data;

4. provide software scripts, etc., and a document reporting the data processing
and software set-up methods developed during the project.

ICEDS was inspired in particular by the Committee on Earth Observing Satellites
(CEOS) CEOS Landsat and SRTM Project (CLASP) proposal. An express intention of
ICEDS (aim 4 in the list above) was therefore that the solution developed by
ESYS and UCL should be redistributable, for example, to other CEOS members.
This was taken to mean not only software scripts but also the methods developed
by the project team to prepare the data and set up the server. In order to be
compatible with aim 4, it was also felt that the use of Open Source, or at
least 'free-of-cost' software for the Web GIS serving was an essential
component. After an initial survey of the Web GIS packages available at the
time , the ICEDS team decided to use the Deegree package, a free software
initiative founded by the GIS and Remote Sensing unit of the Department of
Geography, University of Bonn , and lat/lon . However the Red Spider web
mapping software suite was also provided by IONIC Software - this is a
commercial web mapping package but was provided pro bono by IONIC for this
project and has been used in parallel to investigate the possibilities and
limitations opened up by using a commercial package.

http://iceds.ge.ucl.ac.uk/