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The importance of near real-time access to environmental data has increased steadily over the last few years. In this article, the focus is on the European Environment Agency (EEA), which receives environmental data from a large number of providers. The heterogeneous data formats and data transfer mechanisms make the data collection and integration a difficult task for the EEA. An approach is needed for facilitating the interoperable exchange of environmental data on a large scale. A core element of this approach is the Sensor WebEnablement (SWE) technology of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) which allows the standardized, interoperable, vendor and domain independent exchange of sensor data. The main contribution of this article is a lightweight profile for the OGC Sensor Observation Service that ensures the necessary interoperability for seamlessly integrating the environmental data provided by the EEA's member states and thus forms the foundation for the developed data exchange mechanisms. This is complemented by information about the resulting Sensor Web architecture and the integration into the EEA's existing IT infrastructure. In summary,

We demonstrate the integrated use of semantic and syntactic service descriptions, called deep service descriptions, for service chaining by combining two prototypes: one that deals with geoservice discovery abstract composition (called ‘GeoMatchMaker’), with one that supports concrete composition and execution of geoservices services (called ‘Integrated Component Designer’). Most other service chaining approaches confine themselves to handling either syntactic or semantic service descriptions. The proprietary formats of these descriptions hamper an effective integration of discovery, composition and execution of multiple services. In essence, service chaining should help a user by providing an appropriate combination of executable services to solve a specified problem or query. Current XML‐based service description languages, such as the Web Ontology Language‐Services (OWL‐S) and the Web Service Description Language‐Semantics (WSDL‐S), allow us to build a geoservice‐reuse architecture based on common ontologies and shared service descriptions. Our approach uses annotation as a bridge between the syntax and semantics of services. This paper reports on its context and implementation issues. The target groups of this research are geo‐information engineers who are confronted with information integration issues and service interoperability issues, and secondly, information engineers who in general are confronted with distributed information and with end users that need to access distributed services as one virtual application.

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The objective of upcoming research in the field of geoprocessing is to evolve interoperability standards to develop flexible and scalable controlling and simulation services. In order to overcome the limitations of proprietary solutions, efforts have been made to support interoperability among simulation models and geo information systems (GIS). Existing standards in the domain of spatial information and spatial services define geoinformation (GI) in a more or less static way. Though time can be handled as an additional attribute, its representation is not explicitly specified. In contrast, as the standard for distributed heterogeneous simulation, the High Level Architecture (HLA) provides a framework for distributed time-variant simulation processes but HLA is lacking in supporting spatial information. A web-based Distributed spAtio-temporaL Interoperability architecture DALI integrating these initiatives will be presented here. The long term goal of this DALI Architec ture is making standardized off-the-shelf GI and simulation services usable for highly specialized simulation and controlling applications