e-Collaboration and Grid-on-Demand Computing for Earth Science at ESA

The Grid and emerging e-collaboration computing services are considered as powerful new instruments, enabling and strengthening remote collaboration among researchers. For example, a Gridbased infrastructure can permit alternative approaches to access and exploit large data sets. Instead of traditional remote sensing data ordering and delivering from the acquisition/storage facilities to the user sites, user specialised processing modules could be located wherever data and computing resources are available. Specific on-demand data products, based on the best user-defined parameters, could then be generated or retrieved from archives and downloaded in real-time. Such services can be available via the web to members of a virtual thematic community, using the emerging Web Services standards.