Recently, the publication of scientific data and therewith the implementation of research infrastructures in the Web is getting more and more attention. However, spatial data infrastructures respectively their components are hardly used in research infrastructures of environmental data. This paper reports experiences from the implementation of a scientific spatial data infrastructure supporting the data exchange within a land management and climate change research program.
The publication of scientific environmental data has specific requirements on the spatial data infrastructure. The focus of this article is particularly on the description of data provenance, the support of time series data and distributed geoprocessing in support of scientific work and data preparation. Here, scientific environmental data and also the scientists as specific user group have particular requirements, which are usually not completely supported by available tools. Therefore, the introduced scientific spatial data infrastructure contains a set of specific tools, for example, to support an interactive visualization of data provenance and time series data. The article illustrates and discusses these particular implementations of the GLUES GDI as well as the overall stage of development after four years of project duration.