CHRONOS SYSTEM DATA SERVICES

The CHRONOS System uses a services-oriented architecture. Services are abstracted in SOAP and ReST (Representative State Transfer) connections for use by the community and on the CHRONOS sites. Extending this model to address the data layer, the CHRONOS System is developing in collaboration with others the ability to address collections of data as "Data Services". These individual chunks of data can be identified by a globally unique ID (GUID) system and referenced and passed into services workflows or other data consumers.

The Data Services can be serialized into any local format that a site wishes to use. Utilization of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) format allows for easy creation of transforms via XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) that can cast these data sets into other formats. Combined with the creation of a set of community XML schemas, the design allows for the querying of results based on data, metadata, or GUID assignments across the network and across heterogeneous system architectures. The resulting data can then be resolved to a common interchange format.

A description of the architecture developed for this data services flow and an example implementation of this design on the CHRONOS System will be presented together with a description of how it can interact with other geoinformatics projects.