WGISS Connected Data Assets: 2025 Update
The CEOS Working Group on Information Systems and Services (WGISS) is one of five CEOS Working Groups, and facilitates data and information management related to Earth observation (EO) satellite missions. WGISS supports the provision of services for both data providers and data users, in particular the description, maintenance, discovery, access, and utilization of space-based EO data. One key goal of WGISS is to ensure the accessibility of CEOS Agency data, and foster easier exchange of Earth observation and related data and information to meet the requirements of users and data providers.
To achieve this goal, WGISS established the WGISS Connected Data Assets (WCDA), to simplify cross-Agency data discovery and access. Through ESA’s FedEO (Federated Earth Observation missions access) and NASA’s IDN (International Directory Network), users can discover and access data from over 15 different sources, with more datasets added every month.
FedEO, funded and managed by the European Space Agency (ESA), is a unique entry point to a growing number of scientific catalogues and services for space-based EO datasets, primarily from European and Canadian missions. As of March 2025, FedEO contains over 234 million granules, in almost 2700 collections. FedEO offers a dedicated OpenSearch Client for two-step search capabilities for all collections and granules. Since 2024, the team has been working to include SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) and STAC API interfaces. INPE was the first data provider integrated through STAC, marking a significant milestone in the continuous effort to remain up to date with community standards.
NASA provides the CEOS International Directory Network (IDN), which facilitates access to more than 50,000 Earth science datasets and service descriptions (stored in the Common Metadata Repository [CMR]) which cover subject areas within Earth and environmental sciences. The IDN’s mission is to assist researchers, policy makers, and the public in the discovery and access to data and related services relevant to Earth science research. IDN hosts over 1200 collections containing over 19 million granules (datasets). IDN has also been working to add STAC collections from both INPE and USGS, enhancing the capabilities of the platform. IDN also supports the draft Metadata Management Tool (dMMT), a web-based metadata authoring tool that allows metadata authors to add (or modify) data set descriptions that comply with the CMR Unified Metadata Model for Collections (UMM-C).
For cross platform compatibility, the IDN server obtains from FedEO server the list of collections, such that all FedEO and CMR collections are accessible via IDN. Furthermore, CMR collections are also available via FedEO, by specifying ‘NASA:CMR’ as the endpoint.
To aid in the search and discovery effort, Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) controlled keywords have been developed and are regularly being refined and expanded. These keywords are also used in other applications within the broader scientific community. Keywords imported from the CEOS Missions, Instruments and Measurements (MIM) Database are also used in FedEO and IDN, to ensure compatibility across CEOS services.
CEOS Agencies are requested to regularly review their datasets contained within the WGISS Connected Data Assets. The Client Partner Guide (now available as an executable Jupyter Notebook) provides more information regarding the architecture background and required skills to be a client, the query interface, and an implementation outline, as well as several detailed use cases. For more information, the team can be contacted at Access-SysTeam-Help@wgiss.ceos.org.