A scientific data management infrastructure for environmental monitoring and modelling

Environmental projects often require the collaboration of researchers from different disciplines or domains in an interoperable context. With regard to data handling, most of these projects have an analogous workflow: phenomena are monitored, observation data are captured, (pre-) processed, exchanged, published, and finally disseminated among other scientists, practitioners and stakeholders. In many cases, each of the project partners implements these workflows separately and the integration of the distributed data sets happen in later project stages. In this paper, we present building blocks for research data infrastructure which covers the complete project cycle and supports data integration right from the beginning. Building upon open source software components, we created a software framework, which covers data capture and storage, semantic enrichment, publication and service-based dissemination thus fulfilling the typical needs and requirements of interdisciplinary research projects. A security layer authorizes access to private data sets thus protecting commercial or otherwise, licensed data that are required by the project partners but not intended for public release and display. Besides standards-based geospatial web services, the framework provides a lightweight RESTful API that suits the needs of web developers and facilitates application development for stakeholder engagement and outreach activities.