Interchange technology for applications to facilitate generic access to heterogenous data formats

An Interchange Technology facilitates seamless interactions between applications, tools and services with datasets in heterogeneous formats. The Information Technology and Systems Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville is currently developing this technology focused on Earth Science data, in general, and particularly on the vast amounts of remotely sensed data. The Earth Science Markup Language (ESML) is one such interchange technology and is comprised of description files and a related library of programming utilities. ESML is based on the eXtensible Markup Language (XML™) and allows data "descriptions" to be written in a standard fashion. ESML is unique in that it not only describes the content and structure of the data, but also provides semantic information for the end user application to utilize. Another advantage is that the effort involved to describe legacy data formats in ESML will be small. ESML and the associated library will allow wider interoperability of Earth Science services and tools, enabling Earth Scientists to author, discover, and interpret Earth Science information, and to work more easily with data in a variety of formats and structures. This interchange technology will facilitate the development of dataset-independent searches, visualization, and analysis tools without requiring data to be in any particular format. This paper will describe this interchange technology and provide examples of generic access to heterogeneous remotely sensed data sets.