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ESA joins European effort to create Digital Libraries for science

26 October 2004

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ESA is participating in an international project called DILIGENT - short for a DIgital Library Infrastructure on Grid ENabled Technology. The aim to create the means of generating customised Digital Libraries that enable global collaboration on large scale 'e-science' projects across fields from medical research to particle physics or environmental monitoring.

Credits: ESA

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An example of the power of Grid computing: an overview of changing chlorophyll concentrations associated with marine phytoplankton populations during the Mediterranean summer from May to September 2004, created by combining monthly mosaics of ocean colour data from multiple images acquired by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) on Envisat. Phytoplankton fix carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, forming the base of the marine food chain and help regulate the carbon cycle and through it the global climate system. They are extremely sensitive to variations in local sea conditions. The changing colours indicate chlorophyll concentrations in mg/m³ between 0.01 (darkest blue) to 10.0 (bright red). The white areas mean no data due to cloud cover.

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ESA is a leading European producer of scientific data - in the field of Earth Observation hundreds of gigabytes are produced daily. Here is shown the Envisat computer room in ESA's Centre for Earth Observation (ESRIN) Payload Data Segment. This is where data received from Envisat are processed.

Credits: ESA-S. Corvaja

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Networking enables geographically dispersed 'virtual organisations' to collaborate on the same research goal. These large-scale 'e-science' endeavours are forecast to become more common over the course of this century. The Digital Library on demand infrastructure being developed by the DILIGENT project will facilitate such efforts, providing large-scale computing resources, a shared knowledge base and a secure common environment within which to work.

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The sort of Digital Libraries envisaged by DILIGENT will make all types of relevant data available, not just the sort of text documents central to the traditional library concept. The Grid framework will yield the high-level processing power necessary for the intelligent retrieval and handling of multimedia and geographical information.

Credits: ESA

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The Eastern Mediterranean Sea area is highlighted in this Envisat's MERIS image, featuring Turkey, Cyprus and Crete, acquired on 21 July 2004.

This area is vulnerable to earthquakes and Earth Observation satellite images are useful for providing updated views of how the landscape has been affected as well as creating reference cartography for emergency operations.

Credits: ESA

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The sharing of computing resources in the form of a Grid delivers greatly enhanced processing abilities to users worldwide. Now DILIGENT is applying that same paradigm to information sharing and data retrieval, in the service of scientific research. A number of virtual Digital Libraries would be hosted on the same, shared Grid resources. ESA is participating in the DILIGENT project.