Data and metadata coding and network services for the interoperability of satellite geophysical products

The recent European Community policy on the environment is working in defining a Directive for the Creation of an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the Community (INSPIRE); this Directive aims at promoting geographic data interoperability between governments or other public administrations, ordering the utilization of metadata and proper data coding formats and the establishment of network services for geographic information distribution. Direct satellite data reception and monitoring of sea and land geophysical quantities on a regional scale are regularly carried out at the Satellite Receiving Station of Polo Universitario di Prato (PIN), Italy. Within those activities, issues were considered that deal with geographic data coding, metadata organization and network services management to search and share all the obtained products. A monitoring activity specially addressed to the Tuscany Region, was the basis of a collaboration with the Tuscany Region Environmental Protection Agency (ARPAT) since 1999. Within the investigation of aspects concerning the interoperability of satellite geographic products, a review of the current reference standards was performed; the ISO 19100 series gives the rules for metadata organization and coding with XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language). Because of the lack of precise standards about data coding, at the Satellite Receiving Station, the HDF (Hierarchical Data Format) and GeoTIFF (Geographic Tagged Image File Format) file formats were considered, which are widely used by the scientific community.