Digital Earth is a visionary concept for the virtual representation of the Earth that is spatially referenced, interconnected with the world’s digital data repositories, and encompassing all its systems and forms, includine Earth Sciences, Natural Resources Management, Environmental Monitoring system and human society dimensions. The project will establish open data and services access, allowing European and worldwide Digital Earth Communities to seamlessly access, produce and share data, information, products and knowledge. This will create a multi-dimensional, multi-temporal, and multi-layer information facility of huge value in addressing global challenges such as biodiversity, climate change, pollution and economic development. GENESI-DEC evolves and enlarges the platform developed by the predecessor GENESI-DR project by federating to and interoperating with existing infrastructures.

GENESI-DEC involves key partners of ESFRI projects and collaborates with key actors of Digital Earth and Earth Science initiatives, including the International Society of Digital Earth and GEO-GEOSS. Thus efficient use of already existing and planned developments is guaranteed.

Objectives: The objectives of GENESI-DEC are:

• Enlarge Infrastructure: To enlarge the existing GENESI-DR infrastructures in terms of data, resources availability and geographical extent.
• Guarantee Service: To provide guaranteed, reliable, easy, effective access to a variety of data, facilities, tools and services to an ever increasing number of Digital Earth users from all disciplines.
• Harmonise Federation: To harmonise operations at selected key Digital Earth infrastructures limiting fragmentation of solutions.
• Enable User Collaboration: To enable multidisciplinary collaboration among Digital Earth users as well as the creation of user-configured virtual research facilities/test-beds.
• Respond to Innovation: To integrate new scientific and technological derived paradigms in operational infrastructures in response to the latest Digital Earth requirements.
• Promote Virtualisation: To stimulate, educate and support the creation of virtual Digital Earth research communities.

Action plan: In order to reach the objectives listed above, the project proposes a repetitive approach built around a virtuous cycle of innovation (see Figure 1 ) similar to the one successfully adopted by GENESI-DR. In this approach GENESI-DEC (system, services, capabilities, etc.) will be validated against Digital Earth Community needs for accessing and sharing Digital Earth data and resources, and enhanced as needed, based on the results of the research activities, taking into account developments and constraints in the areas of standardisation, technologies and policies.

The project will start from the infrastructure deployed and operated by the precursor project GENESI-DR. The project will move from the GENESI-DR to the GENESI-DEC project without any interruption of the operations. The participation of core partners of the GENESI-DR consortium to the new project will make this realisable.

During the initial months of the project the infrastructure software and services will be subjected to a first minor upgrade (M4) to include all fixes and enhancements identified and analysed during the final phase of the GENESI-DR project

After this, in the first project year, external infrastructures and Digital Earth Community projects, already selected, will be considered for interoperation with the deployed infrastructure. Meanwhile, other existing infrastructures will be approached, analysed and selected for being integrated in the second project year. The project proposes in fact to run two cycles of innovation resulting into two major upgrades of GENESI-DEC: at the end of each cycle the deployed infrastructure will have integrated more infrastructures and data repositories, and enhanced its set of services and capabilities.

GENESI-DEC is a 2-years project and identifies three Networking Activities – NAs, dealing with project management (WP1), with dissemination, training and standardization (WP2), and with external infrastructures and Digital Earth Communities (WP3), two Services Activities – SAs, dealing with deployment and operation (WP4) and with definition, implementation and testing of the GENESI-DEC system (WP5) and two Joint Research Activities – JRAs , dealing with Geosemantics, Ontology and Workflows (WP6) and with Security Frameworks Interoperability (WP7 ).

As can be seen from Figure 1 , the SAs will act, starting from the deployed GENESI-DR, on requirements and experiences with external infrastructures and applications (via WP3), and results from JRAs as needed during the whole project life-cycle.

Networking activities: Networking Activities are activities that last for quite the whole duration of the project, as they can be seen as “horizontal activities” in the sense that are related to most of the other activities. WP1 regards project management. WP2 deals with dissemination, training and standardisation and is responsible for setting-up the project web site and portal that will provide access to both public and private material and to the user services. Preparation of promotional material, preparation and organisation of training activities and coordination with standardisation bodies, for ensuring adaptation of latest emerging standards and developments and propagation of project developments into these standardisation bodies, is part of WP2 as well. WP2 will also be responsible for Digital Earth community education and building in order to facilitate the take up, the maintenance of GENESI-DEC infrastructure.

WP3 is about both external infrastructures and Digital Earth Communities Projects that will be federated or linked to GENESI-DEC and different disciplines within Digital Earth community whose needs will be addressed with the evolution of the infrastructure.

Service activities: The Service Activities in GENESI-DEC build upon the experience gained and the infrastructure deployed in the predecessor project GENESI-DR. This infrastructure is the base for the successive additions in terms of external e-infrastructures and user communities that will join the GENESI-DEC project. The service activities within GENESI-DEC are aimed at ensuring that the infrastructure with his future extensions will be able to deliver reliable and effective services supporting the diverse research communities providing at the same time innovations that allow usage in an easy and interoperable way.

The consortium has identified two service activities (WP4 and WP5), constituting two of the main elements of the virtuous cycle of innovation, which together will define, implement, validate, set-up, configure, deploy, upgrade and operate GENESI-DEC.

WP5 deals with the definition, implementation and testing of the GENESI-DEC system on a so-called development platform.

WP4 then will set-up, deploy and operate GENESI-DEC on the so-called operational platform inherited from the precursor project GENESI-DR.

The set of e-infrastructures to be tackled for federation/interoperation by WP5 during the first cycle of innovation has been already identified. It includes:

EMSO: a European-scale network of seafloor observatories, constituting a widely distributed infrastructure for long-term monitoring of environmental processes related to ecosystem life and evolution, global changes and geo-hazards.
SEADATANET/GEOSEAS: the Pan-European infrastructure for Ocean & Marine Data Management, which is constructing a standardised and distributed system for managing the large and diverse data sets collected by the oceanographic fleets and the new automatic observation systems.
CEODE: the infrastructure of the Center for Earth Observation and Digital Earth in Beijing, which is responsible for the acquisition, processing, archiving and distribution of airborne and spaceborne remote sensing data over China.
HMA: its objective is to define the interoperability concept across the ground segments of the European, Canadian and EUMETSAT missions which shall contribute to the initial phase of GMES. HMA is implementing various types of services to the EO data users.

Joint Research activities: The two major GENESI-DEC deliveries, as described while presenting the meaning and the products of the virtuous cycle of innovation, will include the outcomes of the two joint research activities identified by the consortium.

The first JRA (WP6- Geosemantics, Ontology and Workflows) will be concerned with the use of semantics and ontologies in assisting geospatial service composition and orchestration; the second JRA (WP7 – Security Frameworks Interoperability) will tackle the security in heterogeneous federated repositories. Both will be responsible for the identification, design and prototyping of applications/elements/services that have then to be passed to WP5 for integration in the GENESI-DEC infrastructure.

User communities: GENESI-DEC aims to address Digital Earth Communities: a first set of these have already been selected, while additional ones will be identified and addressed during the project life, in the framework of WP2.

GENESI-DEC will initially focus on the following Digital Earth Communities, with dedicated use cases:

The Seafloor and Ocean Observation Community
The Global Atmosphere Observation Community using Aircraft
The Global Change Earth Observation Community
The territorial development and spatial planning Community
The Black Sea catchment observation community

In order to establish a real and effective link with these communities (so to assure to properly gather and address their requirements) GENESI-DEC has already set up (through GENESI-DR) collaborations with related and relevant projects and/or organizations. The fact that some of the GENESI-DEC partners are also partners in these projects further strengthen these collaborations.

Some of these projects have developed or are developing dedicated infrastructures (with data) to serve some of the needs of their communities. GENESI-DEC will federate to or interoperate with such dedicated DRs and infrastructures, bringing additional benefits to Digital Earth Community.

In the following figure, an overview is provided of the addressed communities and the projects GENESI-DEC will liaise with for addressing their needs. This set of communities and projects will be reviewed, enlarged, modified and enhanced at the end of Project Year 1.

International aspects: GENESI-DEC has established key collaborations in the frame of Global Environmental initiatives, such as the Global Earth Observation System of System (GEOSS), which will provide decision-support tools to a wide variety of users, being a global and flexible network of content providers allowing decision makers to access an extraordinary range of information at their desk. This “system of systems” will proactively link together existing and planned observing systems around the world and support the development of new systems where gaps currently exist.

Within the frame of a GEO-GEOSS work plan 2009-2011, the DA-09-02a GEO task for effective management of large volumes and diverse types, an Alliance has been proposed among selected data centres/projects (in particular DIAS, GIOVANNI and GENESI-DR) to promote a common vision towards the GEOSS Common Infrastructure [1] .

GENESI-DEC, as already started by GENESI-DR will represent a very innovative way to provide services combining the GEO Portal Clearinghouse and the Registry functionalities.