The Black Sea Catchment Observation System built on a grid-enabled Spatial Data Infrastructure

The Black Sea catchment represents a very large historically rich area of more than 2 million km2 with more than 160 million inhabitants occupying a strategic position between Europe and Asia. It is partially following an unsustainable development caused by inadequate resource management that leads to severe environmental, social and economical problems. The EnviroGRIDS @ Black Sea Catchment project is addressing these issues by bringing several new emerging information technologies that are totally revolutionizing the way we will be looking at our planet in the future. The Global Monitoring for the Environment and Security (GMES) and the Global Earth Observation Systems of Systems (GEOSS) are indeed building a data-driven vision of our planet to explore its past, present and future. The INSPIRE directive is promoting data sharing through interoperability standards at European level, while the UN-SDI is following the same pathway within the United Nations. In order to address the challenges faced by these initiatives of increasing need for data storage and processing, enviroGRIDS will build upon the largest Grid computing infrastructure in the world (EGEE) that will transform elements of software underpinning scenarios and models onto a gridded system. EnviroGRIDS is aiming at building the capacity of scientist to assemble such a system, the data providers to share their data, the capacity of decision makers to use it, and the capacity of the general public to understand the important environmental, social and economical issues at stake.