Global Land Cover Facility  
Company . . . . . . . . . . Global Land Cover Facility
Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . Earth Science
Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . High Performance Repository & Web Query Interface

Background
In May of 1996 the Earth Science Information Partnership (ESIP) signed a cooperative agreement with NASA to build a large-scale web accessible repository for earth science datasets. The project would utilize storage technology previously reserved for supercomputer centers (IBM SP systems, 10 TB data, HPSS software), a powerful Java web query interface, an Informix database and a number of in-house research technologies in order to create one-stop shopping for scientists that required accurate, high-resolution earth science datasets. QuaTeams Team Leader Jim Humphries led the 8-person implementation team responsible for working with the customer on requirements, designing the end-to-end system, implementation, testing, and deployment of the entire system. QuaTeams Software Engineers Allan Tong, and Jim Kukla developed the software required for the project.

Needs
The customer of the system was a worldwide earth science research community who were engaged in studies ranging from urban growth and deforestation, to meteorology and farming and needed datasets that related to vegetative land cover and biophysical processes on the earth. They needed the ability to:

• Quickly locate datasets according to time period, coordinates, and data type.
• Browse and download from a large repositories of data (10 Terabytes to start).
• Create new aggregate products from GIS vector datasets, raster image datasets, and other specialized datasets.