The Centre for Space Geodesy of Italian Space Agency based in Matera is one of the most important research structures in southern Italy and since 90’s it represents the ASI technical facility of Earth Observation.

One of ASI objective is to share information (Data, Products and Services) coming from different Earth Observation (EO) Missions to be used by EO community. This goal can be hard, in a context where the archive size is increasing (sensors/mission variety, quantity and size of products) and applications need to access to large information into huge archives.

ASI is developing an entity dedicated to EO Data Management in the framework of ASI Multi Mission National Centre, devoted to realize applications and tools image data mining oriented. The ASI Multi Mission National Centre is developed to manage the ASI Earth Observation data asset, that is data acquired by heterogeneous sensors and arisen from various missions.

Its main functions are:

• Acquire;
• Store, catalogue and archive;
• Process;
• Distribute data and services;
• Manage users and interface them;
• Handling data, metadata and related documentation and interfacing both commercial and non-commercial users.

The CNM Sub-Systems are:

• the Antenna Sub-System;
• the Reception, Archiving and Distribution Sub-System (RAED);
• the processing Sub-System;
• the User Interface Sub-System.

Planetek Italia has the responsibility for the design and development of some components of the User Interface Sub-System, and namely:

• HDE Help Desk Environment;
• ONF OnLine Navigation Facility;
• USM User Manager.

HDE Help Desk Environment

The HDE is a component of the CNM system able to support users in the tasks of searching for common problems, inserting a request and checking their open request.

The HDE supports operators in the tasks of managing requests inserted by users, writing of common problem and solution in the database and managing documentation.

To achieve these aims the HDE is composed by six sub-component:

• Public area,
• Persistent documentation area,
• Growing knowledge area,
• Trouble ticketing,
• Operators private post-it/notes/log book,
• Wiki engine.

The Help Desk system allows a user to send an Help Desk request via direct insertion, via phone, fax or e-mail, it allows also to open a trouble ticket for each complain, to check the status of the open tickets and to search common problems and solutions (FAQ section) through on-line documentation.

The Help Desk Operator is in charge to manage the user complaints.

Planetek Italia has the responsibility for the design and development also of CNM Web Portal.

ONF OnLine Navigation Facility

In order to support the online navigation of products stored in CNM, the ONF component will provide a compression service in JPEG2000 or ECW format of the CNM products. The ONF module integrates such processors.

The power of such solution resides in two characteristics of the server:

• the ECW and JPEG2000 compression,
• the ECWP transmission protocol.

The first characteristic gives the possibility to store in small archives large information. In fact even with compression factor of about ten times the image is not affected by visible artefacts and it is able to represent the original information. Both ECW and JPEG2000 are based on wavelet compression. ECW is more oriented, and therefore effective, to the compression of geographical information. Thanks to the use of a wavelet compression algorithm, that’s to say a multi-resolution algorithm, it is possible to use a streaming protocol like ECWP to send to the user only the information he needs, to view that portion of the image at the desired resolution.

USM User Manager

The USM User Management Component provides web services for managing information needed for user authentication.

In particular the User Management Component allows:

• Management of the CNM users
• Single-sign-on authentication from all the CNM components

The component provides a set of web services based on the W3C standard, in order to support machine to machine interaction over the network.

The W3C definition refers to client and servers that communicate using XML messages by following the SOAP protocol.

• Go to the JPEG2000 and ECW format page
• W3C: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. The W3C is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web http://www.w3.org/