Towards an open and scalable data grid solution for environment

The volume and complexity of the data produced in the field of environmental sciences has dramatically increased in the past few years. Traditional data management infrastructures cannot deal with this complexity. Enabling discovery, access and management of this data in a federated manner is the role of the new generation of data grids. We have designed OpEnDaG (Open Environmental Data Grid), an open and scalable data grid solution that focuses on discovery and access of environmental data. The metadata used to discover data will be built collaboratively by community users, and discovery is performed by peer-to-peer catalog that brings scalability, ease of federation of multiple sites and is optimized for multi-attribute range queries. Data access is made easy with the use of OPeNDAP, which offers format independence and data subsetting. Most data produced by the environment community is public, simplifying some aspects of data management, yet retaining some important problems. The solution has been designed initially to support the SegHidro project but the proposed design may suit the needs of the wider environmental