Providing access to satellite imagery through OGC catalog service interfaces in support of the Global Earth Observation System of Systems

The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) architecture requires supporting discovery and access to large volumes of Earth Observation data. To support this application requirement in a polar ecosystem scenario, the project constructed a metadata catalog service for pre-collected orthorectified Landsat satellite images with global coverage. This study investigates the characteristics and challenges in building Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. (OGC) catalog service. It further presents a general lightweight XML adapter for relational tables, followed by a general OGC catalog service solution based on this adapter. This adapter relies on two configuration files to make the core software modules independent of the underlying metadata database structure. One configuration file identifies how XML schema is mapped into relational schema, and the other represents the XML output template. At runtime, this adapter internally employs a two-step mechanism: XQuery processing and XML publication. In the XQuery processing step, metadata discovery requests are interpreted, resulting in an SQL query clause. In the XML publication step, this SQL query and other dynamically generated queries are executed to generate the output according to the predefined XML template. Successful application of this OGC catalog service solution in the GEOSS AIP-2 polar ecosystem scenario is presented, followed by an analysis on its advantages and limitations.