Space science informatics

## Earth and Space Science Informatics Area

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This is an effort to see how one would start a division of Earth and Space Science Informatics at the Wikiversity. Having never done this before, we need to figure out how to create a subdivision of the general Informatics section. One particular area of interest is online resources that embed pointers to scientific datasets and tools for interacting with those datasets. The goal is to use this as a mechanism for incorporating Earth and space science datasets into the world wide web.

One concern is what happens if the wikiversity does not catch on after considerable effort has been used to create educational resources in the ESSI division. It will be important to have a mechanism for reusing the materials elsewhere without a major conversion effort.

The mediawiki code is available at Sourceforge and database backups should be available at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.

Many ESSI topics are in the area of data systems:

* delivery systems
* real-time push or subscription such as the Unidata LDM/IDD and BRSS Antelope.
* retrospective pull or on-demand client/server protocols such as OPeNDAP and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Coverage Service (WCS) and Web Feature Service (WFS).
* discovery facilities
* data access tools
* metadata creation and service mechanisms
* analysis and display clients

Currently there is a strong movement to make such capabilities available in the form of web services:

* data services
* catalog/metadata services
* data processing services