GI-axe Homepage

Overview

GI-axe is part of a distributed system for generating, publishing, cataloguing, and processing spatial remote-sensing data for sensor-based transport infrastructure monitoring applications.

GI-axe implements Access Broker functionalities, providing transparent access to normalized data, through the invocation of an appropriate sequence of data pre-processing services, including sub-setting (i.e. trimming, slicing); format conversion; CRS transformation; data interpolation.

GI-axe was designed in order to satisfy the following requirements:

• complement, rather than supplant, the existing access services;
• support the existing Community of Practices in using their own pre-processing components and services;
• comply with INSPIRE transformation services implementing rules.

With special regards to point ii) above, the GI-axe framework is extensible and specifically supports the integration of MATLAB libraries, which are very common in the scientific community, e.g. for data assimilation, correlation, and the like.

In this way, GI-axe effectively enables the implementation of multidisciplinary interoperability, which is one of the main challenges in developing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems for effective geospatial resources sharing, namely for transport infrastructure monitoring and surveillance.

GI-axe has been developed and is being experimented in the multidisciplinary interoperability framework of the EC-funded EuroGEOSS project, as part of a brokering infrastructure for the Biodiversity, Forestry, and Drought thematic areas.

Supported standards

GI-axe is able to perform broker accessed of different data services and publish in turn different standard access interfaces.

Supported access services:

• OPeNDAP
• WCS 1.0.0, 1.1.2, 2.0.1
• WFS 1.0.0, 1.1.0
• WMS 1.1.1, 1.3.0
• OPeNDAP
• FTP
• WAF
• NetCDF
• HDF

Published interfaces:

• GI-axe
• WCS 1.0.0, 2.0.1
• WMS 1.1.1, 1.3.0
• WFS 1.0.0
• WPS 1.0.0

GI-axe in action!

GI-axe access broker is able to both publish and access different access interfaces. It thus can be used with different available client to access data available through different access services.

In the first figure/experiment different services has been federated using GI-cat (discovery broker), including WCS and a THREDDS catalog (the THREDDS catalog, published by Unidata, is an inventory service that makes available different datasets for discovery, published by different access services). In this case a user finds (after a query through the portal GUI) the desired datasets:

• eHabitat WCS (endpoint http://ehabitat-wps.jrc.ec.europa.eu/mapserver/index.php?)
• NCEP OPeNDAP from THREDDS Motherlode (endpoint http://motherlode.ucar.edu/thredds/catalog/fmrc/NCEP/GFS/Global_0p5deg/catalog.xml)

The user is then able to overlay both the datasets using the GI-axe discovery broker. The broker accesses both WCS and OPeNDAP access protocols and is able to translate them to WMS to provide the map overview.

For a more detailed overview of using GI-axe through GI-cat web portal, see Mediated access through GI-portal

In the second experiment the Unidata IDV client is instead used. A IDV user connects directly to the GI-axe WMS service interface by putting it amongst the IDV's data sources). GI-axe in turn accesses the desired GRIB variable through the underlying OPeNDAP access service and convey it as a WMS.

GI-axe download

GI-axe is currently at a prototypal stage and it is distributed only for testing purposes. Mathworks MCR libraries may be needed.

Download GI-axe 1.1 WAR version