EGY: Progress in Global Earth and Space Science Informatics

The past two decades have seen the development of effective ways to acquire, store, and exchange data. This technology requires adoption of community-developed standards for data storage and description to form a basis for sharing data, information, and services. For the 50th anniversary of IGY, scientific societies have promoted the establishment of a system of Virtual Observatories. The Electronic Geophysical Year (eGY) concept embraced all available and upcoming geophysical data and helped organize them into a series of virtual geophysical observatories "deployed" in cyberspace. We describe the essential features of eGY and how it fits into a 21st century vision of informatics.