Community Image Data portal: sharing licensed Earth observation data ∗

TUsage and sharing of Earth Observation data are typically restricted by various licensing terms and conditions imposed by commercial data providers. Standards defining the protocols to transmit such data do not include any identification or security layer yet: they allow optimum software interoperability for sharing data available to the public, but they cannot ensure the required security for licensed data, which requires limited and controlled access. This article aims to present the up to date solutions and recommendations in the fields of data dissemination, authentication and rights management from standard developing organisations and from the Earth Observation community. The project context is the Community Image Data (CID) portal, which is an application for managing and accessing data from a large digital repository of EO data located at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission. Data discovery and data sharing between different and heterogeneous user groups require the provision of interoperability with a large variety of client software; emphasis has therefore been given to the implementation of an infrastructure based on INSPIRE-compliant Discovery, View and Download services, following the same direction undertaken by the EU Member States in their compliance to the European Parliament and Council (2007) INSPIRE Directive: 2007/2/EC, and European Commission (2009): Regulation 976/2009 on Network Services. During the study of standards for such data services, as defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium, the lack of authentication and security features has been identified. Even if numerous initiatives have filled this disparity, the technologies considered cannot assure the required interoperability, as they are not part of the standards implemented in common software. The CID project acknowledged this situation and implemented its own original solution that addresses both the interoperability and data security aspects. Inspired by the electronic commerce domain and its “shopping cart” feature, a “portfolio” concept has been introduced, allowing users to make selections from the available data products, filling up their own ”basket” of EO data. These portfolios are the basis for associated data services, which give access to the selected datasets for the single user, thus ensuring data security.