eScience – A Platform for Earth and Environmental Sciences

Peter Loewe

Authors: Dr. Jens Klump and Dr. Joachim Wächter, GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Germany

Understanding Earth as a system is seen by the geosciences as fundamental to understanding the global challenges we face today, such as climate change or degradation of the natural environment. These challenges can only be met by interdisciplinary cooperation between the earth sciences and other branches of science and engineering. Modern information and communication technologies offer the chance to improve the scientific, technological and management basis necessary to work on complex scientific questions and transfer the results into application. GEO-GRID is the framework to build a generic eScience platform for the Earth- and Environmental Sciences, linking together geodata resources, geosciences libraries, and compute services. The platform will also supply a new generation of tools for the exploration and visualisation of available information, to create added value by interdisciplinary integration in fundamental research and development, as well as supporting technology transfer into application.